Maria Edgeworth - "The Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 2"

Henry Mann - "The Land We Live In"

Samuel Wilberforce - "The Rocky Island"

Robert L. Taylor - "Gov. Bob. Taylor's Tales"

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




What the life was whose texture bore shaping into Homer's verse, we
intend to spend these pages in examining. It is, of course, properly to
be sought for in the poems themselves. But we shall here be concerned
mainly with features which in the original are rather secondary than
prominent, and which have to be collected out of fragments, here a line,
and there a line, out of little hints, let fall by Homer as it were by
accident. Things too familiar to his own hearers to require dwelling on,
to us, whose object is to make out just those very things which were
familiar, are of special and singular value. It is not an enquiry which
will much profit us, if we come to it with any grand notions of the
'progress of the species,' for in many ways it will discourage the
belief in progress.

We have fallen into ways of talking of the childhood and infancy of the
race, as if no beards had grown on any face before the modern
Reformation; and even people who know what old Athens was under
Pericles, look commonly on earlier Greece as scarcely struggling out of
its cradle. It would have fared so with all early history except for the
Bible. The Old Testament has operated partially to keep us in our modest
senses, and we can see something grand about the patriarchs; but this is
owing to exceptional causes, which do not apply to other literature; and
in spite of our admiration of Homer's poetry, we regard his age, and the
contemporary periods in the other people of the earth, as a kind of
childhood little better than barbarism. We look upon it, at all events,
as too far removed in every essential of spirit or of form from our own,
to enable us to feel for it any strong interest or sympathy. More or
less, we have, every one of us, felt something of this kind. Homer's men
are, at first sight, unlike any men that we have ever seen; and it is
not without a shock of surprise that, for the first time, we fall, in
reading him, across some little trait of humanity which in form as well
as spirit is really identical with our own experience. Then, for the
moment, all is changed with us--gleams of light flash out, in which the
drapery becomes transparent, and we see the human form behind it, and
that entire old world in the warm glow of flesh and blood. Such is the
effect of those few child scenes of his, which throw us back into our
old familiar childhood. With all these years between us, there is no
difference between their children and ours, and child would meet child
without sense of strangeness in common games and common pleasures.

The little Ulysses climbing on the knees of his father's guest, coaxing
for a taste of the red wine, and spilling it as he starts at the unusual
taste; or that other most beautiful picture of him running at Laertes's
side in the garden at Ithaca, the father teaching the boy the names of
the fruit-trees, and making presents to him of this tree and of that
tree for his very own, to help him to remember what they were called;
the partition wall of three thousand years melts away as we look back at
scenes like these; that broad, world-experienced man was once, then,
such a little creature as we remember ourselves, and Laertes a calm,
kind father of the nineteenth century. Then, as now, the children loved
to sport upon the shore, and watch the inrolling waves;--then, as now,
the boy-architect would pile the moist sand into mimic town or castle,
and when the work was finished, sweep it away again in wanton humour
with foot and hand;--then, as now, the little tired maiden would cling
to her mother's skirt, and, trotting painfully along beside her, look up
wistfully and plead with moist eyes to be carried in her arms. Nay, and
among the grown ones, where time has not changed the occupation, and the
forms of culture have little room to vary, we meet again with very
familiar faces. There is Melantho, the not over-modest tittering
waiting-maid--saucy to her mistress and the old housekeeper, and always
running after the handsome young princes. Unhappy Melantho, true child
of universal nature! grievous work we should make with most households,
if all who resemble thee were treated to as rough a destiny. And there
are other old friends whom it is pleasant enough to recognise at so long
a distance. 'Certain smooth-haired, sleek-faced fellows--insolent where
their lords would permit them; inquisitive and pert, living but to eat
and drink, and pilfering the good things, to convey them stealthily to
their friends outside the castle wall.' The thing that hath been, that
shall be again. When Homer wrote, the type had settled into its long
enduring form. 'Such are they,' he adds, in his good-natured irony, 'as
the valet race ever love to be.'

With such evidence of identity among us all, it is worth while to look
closer at the old Greeks, to try to find in Homer something beyond fine
poetry, or exciting adventures, or battle-scenes, or material for
scholarship; for awhile to set all that aside, and look in him for the
story of real living men--set to pilgrimise in the old way on the same
old earth--men such as we are, children of one family, with the same
work to do, to live the best life they could, and to save their
souls--with the same trials, the same passions, the same difficulties,
if with weaker means of meeting them.

And first for their religion.

Let those who like it, lend their labour to the unravelling the secrets
of the mythologies. Theogonies and Theologies are not religion; they are
but its historic dress and outward or formal expression, which, like a
language, may be intelligible to those who see the inward meaning in the
sign, but no more than confused sound to us who live in another
atmosphere, and have no means of transferring ourselves into the
sentiment of an earlier era. It is not in these forms of a day or of an
age that we should look for the real belief--the real feelings of the
heart; but in the natural expressions which burst out
spontaneously--expressions of opinion on Providence, on the relation of
man to God, on the eternal laws by which this world is governed. Perhaps
we misuse the word in speaking of religion; we ought rather to speak of
piety: piety is always simple; the emotion is too vast, too
overpowering, whenever it is genuine, to be nice or fantastic in its
form; and leaving philosophies and cosmogonies to shape themselves in
myth and legend, it speaks itself out with a calm and humble clearness.
We may trifle with our own discoveries, and hand them over to the fancy
or the imagination for elaborate decoration. We may shroud over supposed
mysteries under an enigmatic veil, and adapt the degrees of initiation
to the capacities of our pupils; but before the vast facts of God and
Providence, the difference between man and man dwarfs into nothing. They
are no discoveries of our own with which we can meddle, but revelations
of the Infinite, which, like the sunlight, shed themselves on all alike,
wise and unwise, good and evil, and they claim and they permit no other
acknowledgment from us than the simple obedience of our lives, and the
plainest confession of our lips.

Such confessions, except in David's Psalms, we shall not anywhere find
more natural or unaffected than in Homer--most definite, yet never
elaborate--as far as may be from any complimenting of Providence, yet
expressing the most unquestioning conviction. We shall not often
remember them when we set about religion as a business; but when the
occasions of life stir the feelings in us on which religion itself
reposes, if we were as familiar with the Iliad as with the Psalms, the
words of the old Ionian singer would leap as naturally to our lips as
those of the Israelite king.

Zeus is not always the questionable son of Cronus, nor the gods always
the mythologic Olympians. Generally, it is true, they appear as a larger
order of subject beings--beings like men, and subject to a higher
control--in a position closely resembling that of Milton's angels, and
liable like them to passion and to error. But at times, the father of
gods and men is the Infinite and Eternal Ruler--the living Providence of
the world--and the lesser gods are the immortal administrators of his
Divine will throughout the lower creation. For ever at the head of the
universe there is an awful spiritual power; when Zeus appears with a
distinct and positive personality, he is himself subordinate to an
authority which elsewhere is one with himself. Wherever either he or the
other gods are made susceptible of emotion, the Invisible is beyond and
above them. When Zeus is the personal father of Sarpedon, and his
private love conflicts with the law of the eternal order, though he has
power to set aside the law, he dares not break it; but in the midst of
his immortality, and on his own awful throne, he weeps tears of blood in
ineffectual sorrow for his dying child. And again, there is a power
supreme both over Zeus and over Poseidon, of which Iris reminds the
latter, when she is sent to rebuke him for his disobedience to his
brother. It is a law, she says, that the younger shall obey the elder,
and the Erinnys will revenge its breach even on a god.

But descending from the more difficult Pantheon among mankind, the
Divine law of justice is conceived as clearly as we in this day can
conceive it. The supreme power is the same immortal lover of justice and
the same hater of iniquity; and justice means what we mean by justice,
and iniquity what we mean by iniquity. There is no diffidence, no
scepticism on this matter; the moral law is as sure as day and night,
summer and winter. Thus in the sixteenth Iliad--

'When in the market-place men deal unjustly, and the rulers decree
crooked judgment, not regarding the fear of God,' God sends the storm,
and the earthquake, and the tempest, as the executors of his vengeance.

Again, Ulysses says--

'God looks upon the children of men, and punishes the wrong-doer.'

And Eumaeus--

'The gods love not violence and wrong; but the man whose ways are
righteous, him they honour.'

Even when as mere Olympians they put off their celestial nature, and mix
in earthly strife, and are thus laid open to earthly suffering, a
mystery still hangs about them; Diomed, even while he crosses the path
of Ares, feels all the while 'that they are short-lived who contend with
the Immortals.' Ajax boasts that he will save himself in spite of
heaven, and immediately the wave dashes him upon the rocks. One light
word escaped Ulysses in the excitement of his escape from the Cyclops,
which nine years of suffering hardly expiated.

The same spirit which teaches Christians that those who have no earthly
friend have specially a friend above to care for and to avenge them,
taught the Ionians a proverb which appears again and again in Homer,
that the stranger and the poor man are the patrimony of God; and it
taught them, also, that sometimes men entertained the Immortals
unawares. It was a faith, too, which was more than words with them; for
we hear of no vagrant acts or alien acts, and it was sacrilege to turn
away from the gate whoever asked its hospitality. Times are changed. The
world was not so crowded as it is now, and perhaps rogues were less
abundant; but at any rate those antique Greeks did what they said. We
say what they said, while in the same breath we say, too, that it is
impossible to do it.

In every way, the dependence of man on a special heavenly Providence was
a matter of sure and certain conviction with them. Telemachus appeals to
the belief in the Council at Ithaca. He questions it at Pylos, and is at
once rebuked by Athene. Both in Iliad and Odyssey to live justly is the
steady service which the gods require, and their favour as surely
follows when that service is paid, as a Nemesis sooner or later follows
surely, too, on the evil-doers.

But without multiplying evidence, as we easily might, from every part of
both Iliad and Odyssey, the sceptical and the believing forms of thought
and feeling on this very subject are made points of dramatic contrast,
to show off the opposition of two separate characters; and this is clear
proof that such thoughts and feelings must have been familiar to Homer's
hearers: if it were not so, his characters would have been without
interest to his age--they would have been individual, and not universal;
and no expenditure of intellect, or passion, would have made men care to
listen to him. The two persons who throughout the Iliad stand out in
relief in contrast to each other are, of course, Hector and Achilles;
and faith in God (as distinct from a mere recognition of him) is as
directly the characteristic of Hector as in Achilles it is entirely
absent. Both characters are heroic, but the heroism in them springs from
opposite sources. Both are heroic, because both are strong; but the
strength of one is in himself, and the strength of the other is in his
faith. Hector is a patriot; Achilles does not know what patriotism
means;--Hector is full of tenderness and human affection; Achilles is
self-enveloped. Even his love for Patroclus is not pure, for Patroclus
is as the moon to the sun of Achilles, and Achilles sees his own glory
reflected on his friend. They have both a forecast of their fate; but
Hector, in his great brave way, scoffs at omens; he knows that there is
a special providence in the fall of a sparrow, and defies augury. To do
his duty is the only omen for which Hector cares; and if death must be,
he can welcome it like a gallant man, if it find him fighting for his
country. Achilles is moody, speculative, and subjective; he is too proud
to attempt an ineffectual resistance to what he knows to be inevitable,
but he alternately murmurs at it and scorns it. Till his passion is
stirred by his friend's death, he seems equally to disdain the greatness
of life and the littleness of it; the glories of a hero are not worth
dying for; and like Solomon, and almost in Solomon's words, he complains
that there is one event to all--

[Greek: En de ie time e men kakos ee kai esthlos.]

To gratify his own spleen, he will accept an inglorious age in Thessaly,
in exchange for a hero's immortality; as again in the end it is but to
gratify his own wounded pride that he goes out to brave a fate which he
scorns while he knows that it will subdue him. Thus, Achilles is the
hero of the stern human, self-sufficing spirit, which does not deny or
question destiny, but seeing nothing in it except a cold, iron law,
meets force with force, and holds up against it an unbroken, unbending
will. Human nature is at its best but a miserable business to him; death
and sorrow are its inevitable lot. As a brave man, he will not fear such
things, but he will not pretend to regard them as anything but
detestable; and he comforts the old, weeping king of Troy, whose age he
was himself bringing down to the grave in sorrow, with philosophic
meditations on the vanity of all things, and a picture of Zeus mixing
the elements of life out of the two urns of good and evil.

Turn to Hector, and we turn from shadow into sunlight. Achilles is all
self, Hector all self-forgetfulness; Achilles all pride, Hector all
modesty. The confidence of Achilles is in himself and in his own arm;
Hector knows (and the strongest expressions of the kind in all the Iliad
are placed pointedly in Hector's mouth) that there is no strength except
from above. 'God's will,' he says, 'is over all; he makes the strong man
to fear, and gives the victory to the weak, if it shall please him.' And
at last, when he meets Achilles, he answers his bitter words, not with a
defiance, but calmly saying, 'I know that thou art mighty, and that my
strength is far less than thine; but these things lie in the will of
the gods, and I, though weaker far than thou, may yet take thy life from
thee, if the Immortals choose to have it so.'

So far, then, on the general fact of Divine Providence, the feeling of
Homer, and therefore of his countrymen, is distinct. Both the great
poems bearing his name speak in the same language. But beyond the
general fact, many questions rise in the application of the creed, and
on one of these (it is among several remarkable differences which seem
to mark the Odyssey as of a later age) there is a very singular
discrepancy. In the Iliad, the life of man on this side the grave is
enough for the completion of his destiny--for his reward, if he lives
nobly; for his punishment, if he be base or wicked. Without repinings or
scepticisms at the apparent successes of bad men, the poet is contented
with what he finds, accepting cheerfully the facts of life as they are;
it never seems to occur to him as seriously possible that a bad man
could succeed or a good one fail; and as the ways of Providence,
therefore, require no vindicating, neither his imagination nor his
curiosity tempts him into penetrating the future. The house of Hades is
the long home to which men go when dismissed out of their bodies; but it
is a dim, shadowy place, of which we see nothing, and concerning which
no conjectures are ventured. Achilles, in his passion over Patroclus,
cries out, that although the dead forget the dead in the halls of the
departed, yet that he will remember his friend; and through the Iliad
there is nothing clearer than these vague words to show with what hopes
or fears the poet looked forward to death. So far, therefore, his faith
may seem imperfect; yet, perhaps, not the less noble because imperfect;
religious men in general are too well contented with the promise of a
future life, as of a scene where the seeming shortcomings of the Divine
administration will be carried out with larger equity. But whether
imperfect or not, or whatever be the account of the omission, the theory
of Hades in the Odyssey is developed into far greater distinctness; the
future is still, indeed, shadowy, but it is no longer uncertain; there
is the dreadful prison-house, with the judge upon his throne--and the
darker criminals are overtaken by the vengeance which was delayed in
life. The thin phantoms of the great ones of the past flit to and fro,
mourning wearily for their lost mortality, and feeding on its memory.
And more than this, as if it were beginning to be felt that something
more was wanted after all to satisfy us with the completeness of the
Divine rule, we have a glimpse--it is but one, but it is like a ray of
sunshine falling in upon the darkness of the grave--'of the far-off
Elysian fields where dwells Rhadamanthus with the golden hair, where
life is ever sweet, and sorrow is not, nor winter, nor any rain or
storm, and the never-dying zephyrs blow soft and cool from off the
ocean.'

However vague the filling up of such a picture, the outline is correct
to the best which has been revealed even in Christianity, and it speaks
nobly for the people among whom, even in germ, such ideas could root
themselves. But think what we will of their notions of the future, the
old Greek faith, considered as a practical and not a theological system,
is truly admirable, clear, rational, and moral; if it does not profess
to deal with the mysteries of evil in the heart, it is prompt and stern
with them in their darker outward manifestations, and, as far as it
goes, as a guide in the common daily business of life, it scarcely
leaves anything unsaid.

How far it went we shall see in the details of the life itself, the most
important of which in the eyes of a modern will be the social
organisation; and when he looks for organisation, he will be at once at
a loss, for he will find the fact of government yet without defined
form;--he will find law, but without a public sword to enforce it; and a
'social machine' moving without friction under the easy control of
opinion. There are no wars of classes, no politics, no opposition of
interests, a sacred feeling of the will of the gods keeping every one in
his proper subordination. It was a sacred duty that the younger should
obey the elder, that the servant should obey his master, that property
should be respected; in war, that the leader should be obeyed without
questioning; in peace, that public questions should be brought before
the assembly of the people, and settled quietly as the Council
determined. In this assembly the prince presided, and beyond this
presidency his authority at home does not seem to have extended. Of
course there was no millennium in Ionia, and men's passions were pretty
much what they are now. Without any organised means of repressing crime
when it did appear, the people were exposed to, and often suffered
under, extreme forms of violence--violence such as that of the suitors
at Ithaca, or of AEgisthus at Argos. On the other hand, what a state of
cultivation it implies, what peace and comfort in all classes, when
society could hold together for a day with no more complete defence.
And, moreover, there are disadvantages in elaborate police systems.
Self-reliance is one of the highest virtues in which this world is
intended to discipline us; and to depend upon ourselves even for our own
personal safety is a large element in moral training.

But not to dwell on this, and to pass to the way in which the men of
those days employed themselves.

Our first boy's feeling with the Iliad is, that Homer is pre-eminently a
poet of war; that battles were his own passion, and tales of battles the
delight of his listeners. His heroes appear like a great fighting
aristocracy, such as the after Spartans were, Homer himself like another
Tyrtaeus, and the poorer occupations of life too menial for their notice
or for his. They seem to live for glory--the one glory worth caring for
only to be won upon the battle-field, and their exploits the one worthy
theme of the poet's song. This is our boyish impression, and, like other
such, it is very different from the truth. If war had been a passion
with the Ionians, as it was with the Teutons and the Norsemen, the god
of battles would have been supreme in the Pantheon; and Zeus would
scarcely have called Ares the most hateful spirit in Olympus--most
hateful, _because_ of his delight in war and carnage. Mr. Carlyle looks
forward to a chivalry of labour. He rather wishes than expects that a
time may come when the campaign of industry against anarchic nature may
gather into it those feelings of gallantry and nobleness which have
found their vent hitherto in fighting only. The modern man's work, Mr.
Carlyle says, is no longer to splinter lances or break down walls, but
to break soil, to build barns and factories, and to find a high
employment for himself in what hitherto has been despised as degrading.
How to elevate labour--how to make it beautiful--how to enlist the
_spirit_ in it (for in no other way can it be made humanly profitable),
that is the problem which he looks wistfully to the future to solve for
us. He may look to the past as well as to the future; in the old Ionia
he will find all for which he wishes. The wise Ulysses built his own
house, and carved his own bed. Princes killed and cooked their own
food. It was a holy work with them--their way of saying grace for it;
for they offered the animal in his death to the gods, and they were not
butchers, but sacrificing priests. Even a keeper of swine is called
noble, and fights like a hero; and the young princess of Phoeacia--the
loveliest and gracefullest of Homer's women--drove the clothes-cart and
washed linen with her own beautiful hands. Not only was labour free--for
so it was among the early Romans; or honourable, so it was among the
Israelites,--but it was beautiful--beautiful in the artist's sense, as
perhaps elsewhere it has never been. In later Greece--in what we call
the glorious period--toil had gathered about it its modern crust of
supposed baseness--it was left to slaves; and wise men, in their
philosophic lecture-rooms, spoke of it as unworthy of the higher
specimens of cultivated humanity.

But Homer finds, in its most homely forms, fit illustrations for the
most glorious achievements of his heroes; and in every page we find, in
simile or metaphor some common scene of daily life worked out with
elaborate beauty. What the popular poet chooses for his illustrations
are as good a measure as we can have of the popular feeling, and the
images which he suggests are, of course, what he knows his hearers will
be pleased to dwell upon. There is much to be said about this, and we
shall return to it presently; in the meantime, we must not build on
indirect evidence. The designs on the shield of Achilles are, together,
a complete picture of Homer's microcosm; Homer surely never thought
inglorious or ignoble what the immortal art of Hephaistos condescended
to imitate.

The first groups of figures point a contrast which is obviously
intentional; and the significance becomes sadly earnest when we remember
who it was that was to bear the shield. The moral is a very modern one,
and the picture might be called by the modern name of Peace and War.
There are two cities, embodying in their condition the two ideas. In
one, a happy wedding is going forward; the pomp of the hymeneal
procession is passing along the streets; the air is full of music, and
the women are standing at their doors to gaze. The other is in the
terrors of a siege; the hostile armies glitter under the walls, the
women and children press into the defence, and crowd to the
battlements. In the first city, a quarrel rises, and wrong is made
right, not by violence and fresh wrong, but by the majesty of law and
order. The heads of the families are sitting gravely in the
market-place, the cause is heard, the compensation set, the claim
awarded. Under the walls of the other city an ambush lies, like a wild
beast on the watch for its prey. The unsuspecting herdsmen pass on with
their flocks to the waterside; the spoilers spring from their
hiding-place, and all is strife, and death, and horror, and confusion.
If there were other war-scenes on the shield, it might be doubted
whether Homer intended so strong a contrast as he executed; but fighting
for its own sake was evidently held in slight respect with him. The
forms of life which were really beautiful to him follow in a series of
exquisite Rubens-like pictures: harvest scenes and village festivals;
the ploughing and the vintage, or the lion-hunt on the reedy margin of
the river; and he describes them with a serene, sunny enjoyment which no
other old world art or poetry gives us anything in the least resembling.
Even we ourselves, in our own pastorals, are struggling with but half
success, after what Homer entirely possessed. What a majesty he has
thrown into his harvest scene! The yellow corn falling, the boys
following to gather up the large arms-full as they drop behind the
reapers; in the distance a banquet preparing under the trees; in the
centre, in the midst of his workmen, the king sitting in mellow silence,
sceptre in hand, looking on with gladdened heart. Again we see the
ploughmen, unlike what are to be seen in our corn-grounds, turning their
teams at the end of the furrow, and attendants standing ready with the
wine-cup, to hand to them as they pass. Homer had seen these things, or
he would not have sung of them; and princes and nobles might have shared
such labour without shame, when kings took part in it, and gods designed
it, and the divine Achilles bore its image among his insignia in the
field.

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