S.D. Gordon - "Quiet Talks on Power"

Various - "Chronicle Of The Cid"

Theodor Mommsen - "Römische Geschichte Book 2"

Susanna Moodie - "The Monctons: A Novel, Volume I"

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 as soon as we are told that the evil in these human 'automata' being
a necessary condition of this world which God has called into being, is
yet infinitely detestable to God; that the creatures who suffer under
the accursed necessity of committing sin are infinitely guilty in God's
eyes, for doing what they have no power to avoid, and may therefore be
justly punished in everlasting fire; we recoil against the paradox.

No disciple of Leibnitz will maintain, that unless he had found this
belief in an eternity of penal retribution an article of the popular
creed, such a doctrine would have formed a natural appendage of his
system; and if M. de Careil desires to know why the influence of
Spinoza, whose genius he considers so insignificant, has been so deep
and so enduring, while Leibnitz has only secured for himself a mere
admiration of his talents, it is because Spinoza was not afraid to be
consistent, even at the price of the world's reprobation, and refused to
purchase the applause of his own age at the sacrifice of sincerity.

[P] _Refutation Inedite de Spinoza._ Par Leibnitz. _Precedee d'une
Memoire_, par Foucher de Careil. Paris. 1854.




THE DISSOLUTION OF THE MONASTERIES.[Q]


To be entirely just in our estimate of other ages is not difficult--it
is impossible. Even what is passing in our presence we see but through a
glass darkly. The mind as well as the eye adds something of its own,
before an image, even of the clearest object, can be painted upon it.

And in historical enquiries, the most instructed thinkers have but a
limited advantage over the most illiterate. Those who know the most,
approach least to agreement. The most careful investigations are
diverging roads--the further men travel upon them, the greater the
interval by which they are divided. In the eyes of David Hume, the
history of the Saxon Princes is 'the scuffling of kites and crows.'
Father Newman would mortify the conceit of a degenerate England by
pointing to the sixty saints and the hundred confessors who were trained
in her royal palaces for the Calendar of the Blessed. How vast a chasm
yawns between these two conceptions of the same era! Through what common
term can the student pass from one into the other?

Or, to take an instance yet more noticeable. The history of England
scarcely interests Mr. Macaulay before the Revolution of the seventeenth
century. To Lord John Russell, the Reformation was the first outcome
from centuries of folly and ferocity; and Mr. Hallam's more temperate
language softens, without concealing, a similar conclusion. These
writers have all studied what they describe. Mr. Carlyle has studied the
same subject with power at least equal to theirs, and to him the
greatness of English character was waning with the dawn of English
literature; the race of heroes was already failing. The era of action
was yielding before the era of speech.

All these views may seem to ourselves exaggerated; we may have settled
into some moderate _via media_, or have carved out our own ground on an
original pattern; but if we are wise, the differences in other men's
judgments will teach us to be diffident. The more distinctly we have
made history bear witness in favour of our particular opinions, the more
we have multiplied the chances against the truth of our own theory.

Again, supposing that we have made a truce with 'opinions,' properly so
called; supposing we have satisfied ourselves that it is idle to quarrel
upon points on which good men differ, and that it is better to attend
rather to what we certainly know; supposing that, either from superior
wisdom, or from the conceit of superior wisdom, we have resolved that we
will look for human perfection neither exclusively in the Old World nor
exclusively in the New--neither among Catholics nor Protestants, among
Whigs or Tories, heathens or Christians--that we have laid aside
accidental differences, and determined to recognise only moral
distinctions, to love moral worth, and to hate moral evil, wherever we
find them;--even supposing all this, we have not much improved our
position--we cannot leap from our shadow.

Eras, like individuals, differ from one another in the species of virtue
which they encourage. In one age, we find the virtues of the warrior; in
the next, of the saint. The ascetic and the soldier in their turn
disappear; an industrial era succeeds, bringing with it the virtues of
common sense, of grace, and refinement. There is the virtue of energy
and command, there is the virtue of humility and patient suffering. All
these are different, and all are, or may be, of equal moral value; yet,
from the constitution of our minds, we are so framed that we cannot
equally appreciate all; we sympathise instinctively with the person who
most represents our own ideal--with the period when the graces which
most harmonise with our own tempers have been especially cultivated.
Further, if we leave out of sight these refinements, and content
ourselves with the most popular conceptions of morality, there is this
immeasurable difficulty--so great, yet so little considered,--that
goodness is positive as well as negative, and consists in the active
accomplishment of certain things which we are bound to do, as well as in
the abstaining from things which we are bound not to do. And here the
warp and woof vary in shade and pattern. Many a man, with the help of
circumstances, may pick his way clear through life, never having
violated one prohibitive commandment, and yet at last be fit only for
the place of the unprofitable servant--he may not have committed either
sin or crime, yet never have felt the pulsation of a single unselfish
emotion. Another, meanwhile, shall have been hurried by an impulsive
nature into fault after fault--shall have been reckless, improvident,
perhaps profligate, yet be fitter after all for the kingdom of heaven
than the Pharisee--fitter, because against the catalogue of faults there
could perhaps be set a fairer list of acts of comparative generosity and
self-forgetfulness--fitter, because to those who love much, much is
forgiven. Fielding had no occasion to make Blifil, behind his decent
coat, a traitor and a hypocrite. It would have been enough to have
coloured him in and out alike in the steady hues of selfishness, afraid
of offending the upper powers as he was afraid of offending
Allworthy--not from any love for what was good, but solely because it
would be imprudent--because the pleasure to be gained was not worth the
risk of consequences. Such a Blifil would have answered the novelist's
purpose--for he would have remained a worse man in the estimation of
some of us than Tom Jones.

So the truth is; but unfortunately it is only where accurate knowledge
is stimulated by affection, that we are able to feel it. Persons who
live beyond our own circle, and, still more, persons who have lived in
another age, receive what is called justice, not charity; and justice is
supposed to consist in due allotments of censure for each special act of
misconduct, leaving merit unrecognised. There are many reasons for this
harsh method of judging. We must decide of men by what we know, and it
is easier to know faults than to know virtues. Faults are specific,
easily described, easily appreciated, easily remembered. And again,
there is, or may be, hypocrisy in virtue; but no one pretends to vice
who is not vicious. The bad things which can be proved of a man we know
to be genuine. He was a spendthrift, he was an adulterer, he gambled, he
equivocated. These are blots positive, unless untrue, and when they
stand alone, tinge the whole character.

This also is to be observed in historical criticism. All men feel a
necessity of being on some terms with their conscience, at their own
expense or at another's. If they cannot part with their faults, they
will at least call them by their right name when they meet with such
faults elsewhere; and thus, when they find accounts of deeds of violence
or sensuality, of tyranny, of injustice of man to man, of great and
extensive suffering, or any of those other misfortunes which the
selfishness of men has at various times occasioned, they will vituperate
the doers of such things, and the age which has permitted them to be
done, with the full emphasis of virtuous indignation, while all the time
they are themselves doing things which will be described, with no less
justice, in the same colour, by an equally virtuous posterity.

Historians are fond of recording the supposed sufferings of the poor in
the days of serfdom and villanage; yet the records of the strikes of the
last ten years, when told by the sufferers, contain pictures no less
fertile in tragedy. We speak of famines and plagues under the Tudors and
Stuarts; but the Irish famine, and the Irish plague of 1847, the last
page of such horrors which has yet been turned over, is the most
horrible of all. We can conceive a description of England during the
year which has just closed over us (1856), true in all its details,
containing no one statement which can be challenged, no single
exaggeration which can be proved; and this description, if given without
the correcting traits, shall make ages to come marvel why the Cities of
the Plain were destroyed, and England was allowed to survive. The frauds
of trusted men, high in power and high in supposed religion; the
wholesale poisonings; the robberies; the adulteration of food--nay, of
almost everything exposed for sale--the cruel usage of women--children
murdered for the burial fees--life and property insecure in open day in
the open streets--splendour such as the world never saw before upon
earth, with vice and squalor crouching under its walls--let all this be
written down by an enemy, or let it be ascertained hereafter by the
investigation of a posterity which desires to judge us as we generally
have judged our forefathers, and few years will show darker in the
English annals than the year which we have just left behind us. Yet we
know, in the honesty of our hearts, how unjust such a picture would be.
Our future advocate, if we are so happy as to find one, may not be able
to disprove a single article in the indictment; and yet we know that, as
the world goes, he will be right if he marks the year with a white
stroke--as one in which, on the whole, the moral harvest was better than
an average.

Once more: our knowledge of any man is always inadequate--even of the
unit which each of us calls himself; and the first condition under which
we can know a man at all is, that he be in essentials something like
ourselves; that our own experience be an interpreter which shall open
the secrets of his experience; and it often happens, even among our
contemporaries, that we are altogether baffled. The Englishman and the
Italian may understand each other's speech, but the language of each
other's ideas has still to be learnt. Our long failures in Ireland have
risen from a radical incongruity of character which has divided the Celt
from the Saxon. And again, in the same country, the Catholic will be a
mystery to the Protestant, and the Protestant to the Catholic. Their
intellects have been shaped in opposite moulds; they are like
instruments which cannot be played in concert. In the same way, but in a
far higher degree, we are divided from the generations which have
preceded us in this planet--we try to comprehend a Pericles or a
Caesar--an image rises before us which we seem to recognise as belonging
to our common humanity. There is this feature which is familiar to
us--and this--and this. We are full of hope; the lineaments, one by one,
pass into clearness; when suddenly the figure becomes enveloped in a
cloud--some perplexity crosses our analysis, baffling it utterly, the
phantom which we have evoked dies away before our eyes, scornfully
mocking our incapacity to master it.

The English antecedent to the Reformation are nearer to us than Greeks
or Romans; and yet there is a large interval between the baron who
fought at Barnet field, and his polished descendant in a modern
drawing-room. The scale of appreciation and the rule of judgment--the
habits, the hopes, the fears, the emotions--have utterly changed.

In perusing modern histories, the present writer has been struck dumb
with wonder at the facility with which men will fill in chasms in their
information with conjecture; will guess at the motives which have
prompted actions; will pass their censures, as if all secrets of the
past lay out on an open scroll before them. He is obliged to say for
himself that, wherever he has been fortunate enough to discover
authentic explanations of English historical difficulties, it is rare
indeed that he has found any conjecture, either of his own or of any
other modern writer, confirmed. The true motive has almost invariably
been of a kind which no modern experience could have suggested.

Thoughts such as these form a hesitating prelude to an expression of
opinion on a controverted question. They will serve, however, to
indicate the limits within which the said opinion is supposed to be
hazarded. And in fact, neither in this nor in any historical subject is
the conclusion so clear that it can be enunciated in a definite form.
The utmost which can be safely hazarded with history is to relate
honestly ascertained facts, with only such indications of a judicial
sentence upon them as may be suggested in the form in which the story is
arranged.

Whether the monastic bodies of England, at the time of their
dissolution, were really in that condition of moral corruption which is
laid to their charge in the Act of Parliament by which they were
dissolved, is a point which it seems hopeless to argue. Roman Catholic,
and indeed almost all English, writers who are not committed to an
unfavourable opinion by the ultra-Protestantism of their doctrines, seem
to have agreed of late years that the accusations, if not false, were
enormously exaggerated. The dissolution, we are told, was a
predetermined act of violence and rapacity; and when the reports and the
letters of the visitors are quoted in justification of the Government,
the discussion is closed with the dismissal of every unfavourable
witness from the court, as venal, corrupt, calumnious--in fact, as a
suborned liar. Upon these terms the argument is easily disposed of; and
if it were not that truth is in all matters better than falsehood, it
would be idle to reopen a question which cannot be justly dealt with. No
evidence can affect convictions which have been arrived at without
evidence--and why should we attempt a task which it is hopeless to
accomplish? It seems necessary, however, to reassert the actual state of
the surviving testimony from time to time, if it be only to sustain the
links of the old traditions; and the present paper will contain one or
two pictures of a peculiar kind, exhibiting the life and habits of those
institutions, which have been lately met with chiefly among the
unprinted Records. In anticipation of any possible charge of unfairness
in judging from isolated instances, we disclaim simply all desire to
judge--all wish to do anything beyond relating certain ascertained
stories. Let it remain, to those who are perverse enough to insist upon
it, an open question whether the monasteries were more corrupt under
Henry the Eighth than they had been four hundred years earlier. The
dissolution would have been equally a necessity; for no reasonable
person would desire that bodies of men should have been maintained for
the only business of singing masses, when the efficacy of masses was no
longer believed. Our present desire is merely this--to satisfy ourselves
whether the Government, in discharging a duty which could not be
dispensed with, condescended to falsehood in seeking a vindication for
themselves which they did not require; or whether they had cause really
to believe the majority of the monastic bodies to be as they
affirmed--whether, that is to say, there really were such cases either
of flagrant immorality, neglect of discipline, or careless waste and
prodigality, as to justify the general censure which was pronounced
against the system by the Parliament and the Privy Council.

Secure in the supposed completeness with which Queen Mary's agents
destroyed the Records of the visitation under her father, Roman Catholic
writers have taken refuge in a disdainful denial; and the Anglicans, who
for the most part, while contented to enjoy the fruits of the
Reformation, detest the means by which it was brought about, have taken
the same view. Bishop Latimer tells us that, when the Report of the
visitors of the abbeys was read in the Commons House, there rose from
all sides one long cry of 'Down with them.' But Bishop Latimer, in the
opinion of High Churchmen, is not to be believed. Do we produce letters
of the visitors themselves, we are told that they are the slanders
prepared to justify a preconceived purpose of spoliation. No witness, it
seems, will be admitted unless it be the witness of a friend. Unless
some enemy of the Reformation can be found to confess the crimes which
made the Reformation necessary, the crimes themselves are to be regarded
as unproved. This is a hard condition. We appeal to Wolsey. Wolsey
commenced the suppression. Wolsey first made public the infamies which
disgraced the Church; while, notwithstanding, he died the devoted
servant of the Church. This evidence is surely admissible? But no:
Wolsey, too, must be put out of court. Wolsey was a courtier and a
time-server. Wolsey was a tyrant's minion. Wolsey was--in short, we know
not what Wolsey was, or what he was not. Who can put confidence in a
charlatan? Behind the bulwarks of such objections, the champion of the
abbeys may well believe himself secure.

And yet, unreasonable though these demands may be, it happens, after
all, that we are able partially to gratify them. It is strange that, of
all extant accusations against any one of the abbeys, the heaviest is
from a quarter which even Lingard himself would scarcely call
suspicious. No picture left us by Henry's visitors surpasses, even if it
equals, a description of the condition of the Abbey of St. Albans, in
the last quarter of the fifteenth century, drawn by Morton, Henry the
Seventh's minister, Cardinal Archbishop, Legate of the Apostolic See, in
a letter addressed by him to the Abbot of St. Albans himself. We must
request our reader's special attention for the next two pages.

In the year 1489, Pope Innocent the Eighth--moved with the enormous
stories which reached his ear of the corruption of the houses of
religion in England--granted a commission to the Archbishop of
Canterbury to make enquiries whether these stories were true, and to
proceed to correct and reform as might seem good to him. The regular
clergy were exempt from episcopal visitation, except under especial
directions from Rome. The occasion had appeared so serious as to make
extraordinary interference necessary.

On the receipt of the Papal commission, Cardinal Morton, among other
letters, wrote the following letter:--

John, by Divine permission, Archbishop of Canterbury, Primate of all
England, Legate of the Apostolic See, to William, Abbot of the
Monastery of St. Albans, greeting.

We have received certain letters under lead, the copies whereof we
herewith send you, from our most holy Lord and Father in Christ,
Innocent, by Divine Providence Pope, the eighth of that name. We
therefore, John, the Archbishop, the visitor, reformer, inquisitor,
and judge therein mentioned, in reverence for the Apostolic See,
have taken upon ourselves the burden of enforcing the said
commission; and have determined that we will proceed by, and
according to, the full force, tenor, and effect of the same.

And it has come to our ears, being at once publicly notorious and
brought before us upon the testimony of many witnesses worthy of
credit, that you, the abbot afore-mentioned, have been of long time
noted and diffamed, and do yet continue so noted, of simony, of
usury, of dilapidation and waste of the goods, revenues, and
possessions of the said monastery, and of certain other enormous
crimes and excesses hereafter written. In the rule, custody, and
administration of the goods, spiritual and temporal, of the said
monastery, you are so remiss, so negligent, so prodigal, that
whereas the said monastery was of old times founded and endowed by
the pious devotion of illustrious princes, of famous memory,
heretofore kings of this land, the most noble progenitors of our
most serene Lord and King that now is, in order that true religion
might flourish there, that the name of the Most High, in whose
honour and glory it was instituted, might be duly celebrated there;

And whereas, in days heretofore, the regular observance of the said
rule was greatly regarded, and hospitality was diligently kept;

Nevertheless, for no little time, during which you have presided in
the same monastery, you and certain of your fellow-monks and
brethren (whose blood, it is feared, through your neglect, a severe
Judge will require at your hand) have relaxed the measure and form
of religious life; you have laid aside the pleasant yoke of
contemplation, and all regular observances--hospitality, alms, and
those other offices of piety which of old time were exercised and
ministered therein have decreased, and by your faults, your
carelessness, your neglect and deed, do daily decrease more and
more, and cease to be regarded--the pious vows of the founders are
defrauded of their just intent--the ancient rule of your order is
deserted; and not a few of your fellow-monks and brethren, as we
most deeply grieve to learn, giving themselves over to a reprobate
mind, laying aside the fear of God, do lead only a life of
lasciviousness--nay, as is horrible to relate, be not afraid to
defile the holy places, even the very churches of God, by infamous
intercourse with nuns, &c. &c.

You yourself, moreover, among other grave enormities and abominable
crimes whereof you are guilty, and for which you are noted and
diffamed, have, in the first place, admitted a certain married
woman, named Elena Germyn, who has separated herself without just
cause from her husband, and for some time past has lived in adultery
with another man, to be a nun or sister in the house or Priory of
Bray, lying, as you pretend, within your jurisdiction. You have next
appointed the same woman to be prioress of the said house,
notwithstanding that her said husband was living at the time, and is
still alive. And finally, Father Thomas Sudbury, one of your brother
monks, publicly, notoriously, and without interference or punishment
from you, has associated, and still associates, with this woman as
an adulterer with his harlot.

Moreover, divers other of your brethren and fellow-monks have
resorted, and do resort, continually to her and other women at the
same place, as to a public brothel or receiving house, and have
received no correction therefor.

Nor is Bray the only house into which you have introduced disorder.
At the nunnery of Sapwell, which you also contend to be under your
jurisdiction, you change the prioresses and superiors again and
again at your own will and caprice. Here, as well as at Bray, you
depose those who are good and religious; you promote to the highest
dignities the worthless and the vicious. The duties of the order are
cast aside; virtue is neglected; and by these means so much cost and
extravagance has been caused, that to provide means for your
indulgence you have introduced certain of your brethren to preside
in their houses under the name of guardians, when in fact they are
no guardians, but thieves and notorious villains; and with their
help you have caused and permitted the goods of the same priories to
be dispensed, or to speak more truly to be dissipated, in the
above-described corruptions and other enormous and accursed
offences. Those places once religious are rendered and reputed as it
were profane and impious; and by your own and your creatures'
conduct, are so impoverished as to be reduced to the verge of ruin.

In like manner, also, you have dealt with certain other cells of
monks, which you say are subject to you, even within the monastery
of the glorious proto-martyr Alban himself. You have dilapidated the
common property; you have made away with the jewels; the copses, the
woods, the underwood, almost all the oaks, and other forest trees,
to the value of eight thousand marks and more, you have made to be
cut down without distinction, and they have by you been sold and
alienated. The brethren of the abbey, some of whom, as is reported,
are given over to all the evil things of the world, neglect the
service of God altogether. They live with harlots and mistresses
publicly and continuously, within the precincts of the monastery and
without. Some of them, who are covetous of honour and promotion, and
desirous therefore of pleasing your cupidity, have stolen and made
away with the chalices and other jewels of the church. They have
even sacrilegiously extracted the precious stones from the very
shrine of St. Alban; and you have not punished these men, but have
rather knowingly supported and maintained them. If any of your
brethren be living justly and religiously, if any be wise and
virtuous, these you straightway depress and hold in hatred.... You
...

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