May Sinclair - "Life and Death of Harriett Frean"

Elias Owen - "Welsh Folk Lore"

Charles Clark Munn - "Pocket Island"

Hippolyte A. Taine - "The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2"

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




Most of us, at one time or other of our lives, have known something of
love--of that only pure love in which no _self_ is left remaining. We
have loved as children, we have loved as lovers; some of us have learnt
to love a cause, a faith, a country; and what love would that be which
existed only with a prudent view to after-interests. Surely there is a
love which exults in the power of self-abandonment, and can glory in the
privilege of suffering for what is good. _Que mon nom soit fletri,
pourvu que la France soit libre_, said Danton; and those wild patriots
who had trampled into scorn the faith in an immortal life in which they
would be rewarded for what they were suffering, went to their graves as
beds, for the dream of a people's liberty. Justice is done; the balance
is not deranged. It only seems deranged, as long as we have not learnt
to serve without looking to be paid for it.

Such is the theory of life which is to be found in the Book of Job; a
faith which has flashed up in all times and all lands, wherever
high-minded men were to be found, and which passed in Christianity into
the acknowledged creed of half the world. The cross was the new symbol,
the Divine sufferer the great example; and mankind answered to the call,
because the appeal was not to what was poor and selfish in them, but to
whatever of best and bravest was in their nature. The law of reward and
punishment was superseded by the law of love. Thou shalt love God and
thou shalt love man; and that was not love--men knew it once--which was
bought by the prospect of reward. Times are changed with us now. Thou
shalt love God and thou shalt love man, in the hands of a Paley, are
found to mean no more than, Thou shalt love thyself after an enlightened
manner. And the same base tone has saturated not only our common
feelings, but our Christian theologies and our Antichristian
philosophies. A prudent regard to our future interests; an abstinence
from present unlawful pleasures, because they will entail the loss of
greater pleasure by-and-by, or perhaps be paid for with pain,--this is
called virtue now; and the belief that such beings as men can be
influenced by any more elevated feelings, is smiled at as the dream of
enthusiasts whose hearts have outrun their understandings. Indeed, he
were but a poor lover whose devotion to his mistress lay resting on the
feeling that a marriage with her would conduce to his own comforts. That
were a poor patriot who served his country for the hire which his
country would give to him. And we should think but poorly of a son who
thus addressed his earthly father: 'Father, on whom my fortunes depend,
teach me to do what pleases thee, that I, pleasing thee in all things,
may obtain those good things which thou hast promised to give to thy
obedient children.' If any of us who have lived in so meagre a faith
venture, by-and-by, to put in our claims, Satan will be likely to say of
us (with better reason than he did of Job), 'Did they serve God for
nought, then? Take their reward from them, and they will curse Him to
His face.' If Christianity had never borne itself more loftily than
this, do we suppose that those fierce Norsemen who had learnt, in the
fiery war-songs of the Edda, of what stuff the hearts of heroes are
composed, would have fashioned their sword-hilts into crosses, and
themselves into a crusading chivalry? Let us not dishonour our great
fathers with the dream of it. The Christians, like the Stoics and the
Epicureans, would have lived their little day among the ignoble sects of
an effete civilisation, and would have passed off and been heard of no
more. It was in another spirit that those first preachers of
righteousness went out upon their warfare with evil. They preached, not
enlightened prudence, but purity, justice, goodness; holding out no
promises in this world except of suffering as their great Master had
suffered, and rejoicing that they were counted worthy to suffer for His
sake. And that crown of glory which they did believe to await them in a
life beyond the grave, was no enjoyment of what they had surrendered in
life, was not enjoyment at all in any sense which human thought or
language can attach to the words; as little like it as the crown of love
is like it, which the true lover looks for when at last he obtains his
mistress. It was to be with Christ--to lose themselves in Him.

How these high feelings ebbed away, and Christianity became what we know
it, we are partially beginning to see. The living spirit organised for
itself a body of perishable flesh: not only the real gains of real
experience, but mere conjectural hypotheses, current at the day for the
solution of unexplained phenomena, became formulae and articles of faith.
Again, as before, the living and the dead were bound together, and the
seeds of decay were already planted on the birth of a constructed
polity.

But there was another cause allied to this, and yet different from it,
which, though a law of human nature itself, seems nowadays altogether
forgotten. In the rapid and steady advance of our knowledge of material
things, we are apt to believe that all our knowledge follows the same
law; that it is merely generalised experience; that experience
accumulates daily, and, therefore, that 'progress of the species,' _in
all senses_, is an obvious and necessary fact. There is something which
is true in this view, mixed with a great deal which is false. Material
knowledge, the physical and mechanical sciences, make their way from
step to step, from experiment to experiment, and each advance is secured
and made good, and cannot again be lost. One generation takes up the
general sum of experience where the last laid it down, adds to it what
it has the opportunity of adding, and leaves it with interest to the
next. The successive positions, as they are gained, require nothing for
the apprehension of them but an understanding ordinarily cultivated.
Prejudices have to be encountered, but prejudices of opinion merely, not
prejudices of conscience or prejudices of self-love, like those which
beset our progress in the science of morality. But in morals we enter
upon conditions wholly different--conditions in which age differs from
age, man differs from man, and even from himself, at different moments.
We all have experienced times when, as we say, we should not know
ourselves; some, when we fall below our average level; some, when we are
lifted above, and put on, as it were, a higher nature. At such intervals
as these last (unfortunately, with most of us, of rare occurrence), many
things become clear to us which before were hard sayings; propositions
become alive which, usually, are but dry words; our hearts seem purer,
our motives loftier; our purposes, what we are proud to acknowledge to
ourselves.

And, as man is unequal to himself, so is man to his neighbour, and
period to period. The entire method of action, the theories of human
life which in one era prevail universally, to the next are unpractical
and insane, as those of this next would have seemed mere baseness to the
first, if the first could have anticipated them. One epoch, we may
suppose, holds some 'greatest nobleness principle,' the other some
'greatest happiness principle;' and then their very systems of axioms
will contradict one another; their general conceptions and their
detailed interpretations, their rules, judgments, opinions, practices
will be in perpetual and endless collision. Our minds take shape from
our hearts, and the facts of moral experience do not teach their own
meaning, but submit to many readings according to the power of the eye
which we bring with us.

The want of a clear perception of so important a feature about us leads
to many singular contradictions. A believer in popular Protestantism,
who is also a believer in progress, ought, if he were consistent, to
regard mankind as growing every day towards a more and more advantageous
position with respect to the trials of life; and yet if he were asked
whether it was easier for him to 'save his soul' in the nineteenth
century than it would have been in the first or second, or whether the
said soul was necessarily better worth saving, he would be perplexed for
an answer. There is hardly one of us who, in childhood, has not felt
like the Jews to whom Christ spoke, that if he had 'lived in the days of
the Fathers,' if he had had their advantages, he would have found duty a
much easier matter; and some of us in mature life have felt that in old
Athens, or old republican Rome, in the first ages of Christianity, in
the Crusades or at the Reformation, there was a contagious atmosphere of
heroism, in which we should have been less troubled with the little
feelings which cling about us now. At any rate, it is at these rare
epochs only that real additions are made to our moral knowledge. At such
times, new truths are, indeed, sent down among us, and, for periods
longer or shorter, may be seen to exercise an elevating influence on
mankind. Perhaps what is gained on these occasions is never entirely
lost. The historical monuments of their effects are at least
indestructible; and when the spirit which gave them birth reappears,
their dormant energy awakens again.

But it seems from our present experience of what, in some at least of
its modern forms, Christianity has been capable of becoming, that there
is no doctrine in itself so pure, but what the meaner nature which is in
us can disarm and distort it, and adapt it to its own littleness. The
once living spirit dries up into formulae, and formulae, whether of
mass-sacrifice or vicarious righteousness, or 'reward and punishment,'
are contrived ever so as to escape making over-high demands upon the
conscience. Some aim at dispensing with obedience altogether, and those
which insist on obedience rest the obligations of it on the poorest of
motives. So things go on till there is no life left at all; till, from
all higher aspirations, we are lowered down to the love of self after an
enlightened manner; and then nothing remains but to fight the battle
over again. The once beneficial truth has become, as in Job's case, a
cruel and mischievous deception, and the whole question of life and its
obligations must again be opened.

It is now some three centuries since the last of such reopenings. If we
ask ourselves how much during this time has been actually added to the
sum of our knowledge in these matters; what, in all the thousands upon
thousands of sermons, and theologies, and philosophies with which Europe
has been deluged, has been gained for mankind beyond what we have found
in this Book of Job, how far all this has advanced us in the 'progress
of humanity,' it were hard, or rather it is easy, to answer. How far we
have fallen below, let Paley and the rest bear witness. But what moral
question can be asked which admits now of a grander solution than was
offered two, perhaps three, thousand years ago? The world has not been
standing still; experience of man and life has increased; questions have
multiplied on questions, while the answers of the established teachers
to them have been growing every day more and more incredible. What other
answers have there been? Of all the countless books which have appeared,
there has been only one of enduring importance, in which an attempt is
made to carry on the solution of the great problem. Job is given over
into Satan's hand to be tempted; and though he shakes, he does not fall.
Taking the temptation of Job for his model, Goethe has similarly
exposed his Faust to trial, and with him the tempter succeeds. His hero
falls from sin to sin, from crime to crime; he becomes a seducer, a
murderer, a betrayer, following recklessly his evil angel wherever he
chooses to lead him; and yet, with all this, he never wholly forfeits
our sympathy. In spite of his weakness, his heart is still true to his
higher nature; sick and restless, even in the delirium of enjoyment he
always longs for something better, and he never can be brought to say of
evil that it is good. And therefore, after all, the devil is balked of
his prey; in virtue of this one fact, that the evil in which he steeped
himself remained to the last hateful to him, Faust is saved by the
angels.... It will be eagerly answered for the established belief, that
such cases are its especial province. All men are sinners, and _it_
possesses the blessed remedy for sin. But, among the countless numbers
of those characters so strangely mixed among us, in which the dark and
the bright fibres cross like a meshwork; characters at one moment
capable of acts of heroic greatness, at another hurried by temptation
into actions which even common men may deplore, how many are there who
have never availed themselves of the conditions of reconciliation as
orthodoxy proffers them, and of such men what is to be said? It was said
once of a sinner that to her 'much was forgiven, for she loved much.'
But this is language which theology has as little appropriated as the
Jews could appropriate the language of Job. It cannot recognise the
power of the human heart. It has no balance in which to weigh the good
against the evil; and when a great Burns or a Mirabeau comes before it,
it can but tremblingly count up the offences committed, and then,
looking to the end, and finding its own terms not to have been complied
with, it faintly mutters its anathema. Sin only it can apprehend and
judge; and for the poor acts of struggling heroism, 'Forasmuch as they
were not done,' &c., &c., it doubts not but they have the nature of
sin.[M]

Something of the difficulty has been met by Goethe, but it cannot be
said that he has resolved it; or at least that he has furnished others
with a solution which may guide their judgment. In the writer of the
Book of Job there is an awful moral earnestness before which we bend as
in the presence of a superior being. The orthodoxy against which he
contended is not set aside or denied; he sees what truth is in it; only
he sees more than it, and over it, and through it. But in Goethe, who
needed it more, inasmuch as his problem was more delicate and difficult,
the moral earnestness is not awful, is not even high. We cannot feel
that in dealing with sin he entertains any great horror of it; he looks
on it as a mistake, as undesirable, but scarcely as more. Goethe's great
powers are of another kind; and this particular question, though in
appearance the primary subject of the poem, is really only secondary. In
substance, Faust is more like Ecclesiastes than it is like Job, and
describes rather the restlessness of a largely-gifted nature which,
missing the guidance of the heart, plays experiments with life, trying
knowledge, pleasure, dissipation, one after another, and hating them
all; and then hating life itself as a weary, stale, flat, unprofitable
mockery. The temper exhibited here will probably be perennial in the
world. But the remedy for it will scarcely be more clear under other
circumstances than it is at present, and lies in the disposition of the
emotions, and not in any propositions which can be addressed to the
understanding.

For that other question--how rightly to estimate a human being; what
constitutes a real vitiation of character, and how to distinguish,
without either denying the good or making light of the evil; how to be
just to the popular theories, and yet not to blind ourselves to their
shallowness and injustice--that is a problem for us, for the solution of
which we are at present left to our ordinary instinct, without any
recognised guidance whatsoever.

Nor is this the only problem which is in the same situation. There can
scarcely be a more startling contrast between fact and theory than the
conditions under which, practically, positions of power and influence
are distributed among us--between the theory of human worth which the
necessities of life oblige us to act upon, and the theory which we
believe that we believe. As we look around among our leading men, our
statesmen, our legislators, the judges on our bench, the commanders of
our armies, the men to whom this English nation commits the conduct of
its best interests, profane and sacred, what do we see to be the
principles which guide our selection? How entirely do they lie beside
and beyond the negative tests! and how little respect do we pay to the
breach of this or that commandment in comparison with ability! So wholly
impossible is it to apply the received opinions on such matters to
practice--to treat men known to be guilty of what theology calls deadly
sins, as really guilty of them, that it would almost seem we had fallen
into a moral anarchy; that ability _alone_ is what we regard, without
any reference at all, except in glaring and outrageous cases, to moral
disqualifications. It is invidious to mention names of living men; it is
worse than invidious to drag out of their graves men who have gone down
into them with honour, to make a point for an argument. But we know, all
of us, that among the best servants of our country there have been, and
there are, many whose lives will not stand scrutiny by the negative
tests, and who do not appear very greatly to repent, or to have
repented, of their sins according to recognised methods.

Once more: among our daily or weekly confessions, which we are supposed
to repeat as if we were all of us at all times in precisely the same
moral condition, we are made to say that we have done those things which
we ought not to have done, and to have left undone those things which we
ought to have done. An earthly father to whom his children were day
after day to make this acknowledgment would be apt to enquire whether
they were trying to do better--whether, at any rate, they were
endeavouring to learn; and if he were told that although they had made
some faint attempts to understand the negative part of their duty, yet
that of the positive part, of those things which they ought to do, they
had no notions at all, and had no idea that they were under obligation
to form any, he would come to rather strange conclusions about them.
But, really and truly, what practical notions of duty have we beyond
that of abstaining from committing sins? Not to commit sin, we suppose,
covers but a small part of what is expected of us. Through the entire
tissue of our employments there runs a good and a bad. Bishop Butler
tells us, for instance, that even of our time there is a portion which
is ours, and a portion which is our neighbour's; and if we spend more of
it on personal interests than our own share, we are stealing. This
sounds strange doctrine; we prefer making vague acknowledgments, and
shrink from pursuing them into detail. We say vaguely, that in all we
do we should consecrate ourselves to God, and our own lips condemn us;
for which among us cares to learn the way to do it? The _devoir_ of a
knight was understood in the courts of chivalry; the lives of heroic
men, Pagan and Christian, were once held up before the world as patterns
of detailed imitation; and now, when such ideals are wanted more than
ever, Protestantism stands with a drawn sword on the threshold of the
enquiry, and tells us that it is impious. The law, we are told, has been
fulfilled for us in condescension to our inherent worthlessness, and our
business is to appropriate another's righteousness, and not, like
Titans, to be scaling heaven by profane efforts of our own. Protestants,
we know very well, will cry out in tones loud enough at such a
representation of their doctrines. But we know also that unless men may
feel a cheerful conviction that they can do right if they try,--that
they can purify themselves, can live noble and worthy lives,--unless
this is set before them as _the_ thing which they are to do, and _can_
succeed in doing, they will not waste their energies on what they know
beforehand will end in failure; and if they may not live for God, they
will live for themselves.

And all this while the whole complex frame of society is a meshwork of
duty woven of living fibre, and the condition of its remaining sound is,
that every thread of it, of its own free energy, shall do what it ought.
The penalties of duties neglected are to the full as terrible as those
of sins committed; more terrible, perhaps, because more palpable and
sure. A lord of the land, or an employer of labour, supposes that he has
no duty except to keep what he calls the commandments in his own person,
to go to church, and to do what he will with his own,--and Irish famines
follow, and trade strikes, and chartisms, and Paris revolutions. We look
for a remedy in impossible legislative enactments, and there is but one
remedy which will avail--that the thing which we call public opinion
learn something of the meaning of human obligation, and demand some
approximation to it. As things are, we have no idea of what a human
being ought to be. After the first rudimental conditions we pass at once
into meaningless generalities; and with no knowledge to guide our
judgment, we allow it to be guided by meaner principles; we respect
money, we respect rank, we respect ability--character is as if it had no
existence.

In the midst of this loud talk of progress, therefore, in which so many
of us at present are agreed to believe, which is, indeed, the common
meeting point of all the thousand sects into which we are split, it is
with saddened feelings that we see so little of it in so large a matter.
Progress there is in knowledge; and science has enabled the number of
human beings capable of existing upon this earth to be indefinitely
multiplied. But this is but a small triumph if the ratio of the good and
bad, the wise and the foolish, the full and the hungry, remains
unaffected. And we cheat ourselves with words when we conclude out of
our material splendour an advance of the race.

In two things there is progress--progress in knowledge of the outward
world, and progress in material wealth. This last, for the present,
creates, perhaps, more evils than it relieves; but suppose this
difficulty solved--suppose the wealth distributed, and every peasant
living like a peer--what then? If this is all, one noble soul outweighs
the whole of it. Let us follow knowledge to the outer circle of the
universe--the eye will not be satisfied with seeing, nor the ear with
hearing. Let us build our streets of gold, and they will hide as many
aching hearts as hovels of straw. The well-being of mankind is not
advanced a single step. Knowledge is power, and wealth is power; and
harnessed, as in Plato's fable, to the chariot of the soul, and guided
by wisdom, they may bear it through the circle of the stars; but left to
their own guidance, or reined by a fool's hand, the wild horses may
bring the poor fool to Phaeton's end, and set a world on fire.

FOOTNOTES:

[G] _Westminster Review_, 1853.

[H] 1. _Die poetischen Buecher des Alten Bundes._ Erklaert von Heinrich
Ewald. Goettingen: bei Vanderhoeck und Ruprecht. 1836.

2. _Kurz gefasstes exegetisches Handbuch zum Alten Testament._ Zweite
Lieferung. _Hiob._ Von Ludwig Hirzel. Zweite Auflage, durchgesehen von
Dr. Justus Olshausen. Leipzig. 1852.

3. _Quaestionum in Jobeidos locos vexatos Specimen._ Von D. Hermannus
Hupfeld. Halis Saxonum. 1853.

[I] Or rather by St. Jerome, whom our translators have followed.

[J] See Ewald on Job ix. 13, and xxvi. 14.

[K] An allusion, perhaps, to the old bird auguries. The birds, as the
inhabitants of the air, were supposed to be the messengers between
heaven and earth.

[L] The speech of Elihu, which lies between Job's last words and God's
appearance, is now decisively pronounced by Hebrew scholars not to be
genuine. The most superficial reader will have been perplexed by the
introduction of a speaker to whom no allusion is made, either in the
prologue or the epilogue; by a long dissertation, which adds nothing to
the progress of the argument, proceeding evidently on the false
hypothesis of the three friends, and betraying not the faintest
conception of the real cause of Job's sufferings. And the suspicions
which such an anomaly would naturally suggest, are now made certainties
by a fuller knowledge of the language, and the detection of a different
hand. The interpolator has unconsciously confessed the feeling which
allowed him to take so great a liberty. He, too, possessed with the old
Jew theory, was unable to accept in its fulness so great a contradiction
to it: and, missing the spirit of the poem, he believed that God's
honour could still be vindicated in the old way. 'His wrath was kindled'
against the friends, because they could not answer Job; and against Job,
because he would not be answered; and conceiving himself 'full of
matter,' and 'ready to burst like new bottles,' he could not contain
himself, and delivered into the text a sermon on the _Theodice_, such,
we suppose, as formed the current doctrine of the time in which he
lived.

[M] See the Thirteenth Article.




SPINOZA.[N]

_Benedicti de Spinoza Tractatus de Deo et Homine ejusque Felicitate
Lineamenta. Atque Annotationes ad Tractatum Theologico-Politicum._
Edidit et illustravit EDWARDUS BOEHMER. Halae ad Salam. J. F. Lippert.
1852.

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