Jacob Michael Reinhold Lenz - "Der Engländer"

Moliere (Poquelin) - "The Shopkeeper Turned Gentleman"

William Shakespeare - "Leben und Tod des Koenigs Johann"

Jessie Graham Flower - "Grace Harlowe's Problem"

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




I am speaking of the form which these things assumed in an age of
degradation and ignorance. The truest and wisest words ever spoken by
man might be abused in the same way.

The Sermon on the Mount or the Apostles' Creed, if recited mechanically,
and relied on to work a mechanical effort, would be no less perniciously
idolatrous.

You can see something of the same kind in a milder form in Spain at the
present day. The Spaniards, all of them, high and low, are expected to
buy annually a Pope's Bula or Bull--a small pardon, or indulgence, or
plenary remission of sins. The exact meaning of these things is a little
obscure; the high authorities themselves do not universally agree about
them, except so far as to say that they are of prodigious value of some
sort. The orthodox explanation, I believe, is something of this kind.
With every sin there is the moral guilt and the temporal penalty. The
pardon cannot touch the guilt; but when the guilt is remitted, there is
still the penalty. I may ruin my health by a dissolute life; I may
repent of my dissoluteness and be forgiven; but the bad health will
remain. For bad health, substitute penance in this world and purgatory
in the next; and in this sphere the indulgence takes effect.

Such as they are, at any rate, everybody in Spain has these bulls; you
buy them in the shops for a shilling apiece.

This is one form of the thing. Again, at the door of a Spanish church
you will see hanging on the wall an intimation that whoever will pray so
many hours before a particular image shall receive full forgiveness of
his sins. Having got that, one might suppose he would be satisfied; but
no--if he prays so many more hours, he can get off a hundred years of
purgatory, or a thousand, or ten thousand. In one place I remember
observing that for a very little trouble a man could escape a hundred
and fifty thousand years of purgatory.

What a prospect for the ill-starred Protestant, who will be lucky if he
is admitted into purgatory at all!

Again, if you enter a sacristy, you will see a small board like the
notices addressed to parishioners in our vestries. On particular days it
is taken out and hung up in the church, and little would a stranger,
ignorant of the language, guess the tremendous meaning of that
commonplace appearance. On these boards is written 'Hoy se sacan
animas,'--'This day, souls are taken out of purgatory.' It is an
intimation to every one with a friend in distress that now is his time.
You put a shilling in a plate, you give your friend's name, and the
thing is done. One wonders why, if purgatory can be sacked so easily,
any poor wretch is left to suffer there.

Such practices nowadays are comparatively innocent, the money asked and
given is trifling, and probably no one concerned in the business
believes much about it. They serve to show, however, on a small scale,
what once went on on an immense scale; and even such as they are, pious
Catholics do not much approve of them. They do not venture to say much
on the subject directly, but they allow themselves a certain
good-humoured ridicule. A Spanish novelist of some reputation tells a
story of a man coming to a priest on one of these occasions, putting a
shilling in the plate, and giving in the name of his friend.

'Is my friend's soul out?' he asked. The priest said it was. 'Quite
sure?' the man asked. 'Quite sure,' the priest answered. 'Very well,'
said the man, 'if he is out of purgatory they will not put him in again:
it is a bad shilling.'

Sadder than all else, even as the most beautiful things are worst in
their degradation, was the condition of the monasteries. I am here on
delicate ground. The accounts of those institutions, as they existed in
England and Germany at the time of their suppression, is so shocking
that even impartial writers have hesitated to believe the reports which
have come down to us. The laity, we are told, determined to appropriate
the abbey lands, and maligned the monks to justify the spoliation. Were
the charge true, the religious orders would still be without excuse, for
the whole education of the country was in the hands of the clergy; and
they had allowed a whole generation to grow up, which, on this
hypothesis, was utterly depraved.

But no such theory can explain away the accumulated testimony which
comes to us--exactly alike--from so many sides and witnesses. We are not
dependent upon evidence which Catholics can decline to receive. In the
reign of our Henry the Seventh the notorious corruption of some of the
great abbeys in England brought them under the notice of the Catholic
Archbishop of Canterbury, Cardinal Morton. The archbishop, unable to
meddle with them by his own authority, obtained the necessary powers
from the Pope. He instituted a partial visitation in the neighbourhood
of London; and the most malignant Protestant never drew such a picture
of profligate brutality as Cardinal Morton left behind him in his
Register, in a description of the great Abbey of St. Albans. I cannot,
in a public lecture, give you the faintest idea of what it contains. The
monks were bound to celibacy--that is to say, they were not allowed to
marry. They were full-fed, idle, and sensual; of sin they thought only
as something extremely pleasant, of which they could cleanse one another
with a few mumbled words as easily as they could wash their faces in a
basin. And there I must leave the matter. Anybody who is curious for
particulars may see the original account in Morton's Register, in the
Archbishop's library at Lambeth.

A quarter of a century after this there appeared in Germany a book, now
called by Catholics an infamous libel, the 'Epistolae Obscurorum
Virorum.' 'The obscure men,' supposed to be the writers of these
epistles, are monks or students of theology. The letters themselves are
written in dog-Latin--a burlesque of the language in which
ecclesiastical people then addressed each other. They are sketches,
satirical, but not malignant, of the moral and intellectual character of
these reverend personages.

On the moral, and by far the most important, side of the matter I am
still obliged to be silent; but I can give you a few specimens of the
furniture of the theological minds, and of the subjects with which they
were occupied.

A student writes to his ghostly father in an agony of distress because
he has touched his hat to a Jew. He mistook him for a doctor of
divinity; and on the whole, he fears he has committed mortal sin. Can
the father absolve him? Can the bishop absolve him? Can the Pope absolve
him? His case seems utterly desperate.

Another letter describes a great intellectual riddle, which was argued
for four days at the School of Logic at Louvaine. A certain Master of
Arts had taken out his degree at Louvaine, Leyden, Paris, Oxford,
Cambridge, Padua, and four other universities. He was thus a member of
ten universities. But how _could_ a man be a member of ten universities?
A university was a body, and one body might have many members; but how
one member could have many bodies, passed comprehension. In such a
monstrous anomaly, the member would be the body, and the universities
the member, and this would be a scandal to such grave and learned
corporations. The holy doctor St. Thomas himself could not make himself
into the body of ten universities.

The more the learned men argued, the deeper they floundered, and at
length gave up the problem in despair.

Again: a certain professor argues that Julius Caesar could not have
written the book which passes under the name of 'Caesar's Commentaries,'
because that book is written in Latin, and Latin is a difficult
language; and a man whose life is spent in marching and fighting has
notoriously no time to learn Latin.

Here is another fellow--a monk this one--describing to a friend the
wonderful things which he has seen in Rome.

'You may have heard,' he says, 'how the Pope did possess a monstrous
beast called an Elephant. The Pope did entertain for this beast a very
great affection, and now behold it is dead. When it fell sick, the Pope
called his doctors about him in great sorrow, and said to them, "If it
be possible, heal my elephant." Then they gave the elephant a purge,
which cost five hundred crowns, but it did not avail, and so the beast
departed; and the Pope grieves much for his elephant, for it was indeed
a miraculous beast, with a long, long, prodigious long nose; and when it
saw the Pope it kneeled down before him and said, with a terrible voice,
"Bar, bar, bar!"'

I will not tire you with any more of this nonsense, especially as I
cannot give you the really characteristic parts of the book.

I want you to observe, however, what Sir Thomas More says of it, and
nobody will question that Sir Thomas More was a good Catholic and a
competent witness. 'These epistles,' he says, 'are the delight of
everyone. The wise enjoy the wit; the blockheads of monks take them
seriously, and believe that they have been written to do them honour.
When we laugh, they think we are laughing at the style, which they admit
to be comical. But they think the style is made up for by the beauty of
the sentiment. The scabbard, they say, is rough, but the blade within it
is divine. The deliberate idiots would not have found out the jest for
themselves in a hundred years.'

Well might Erasmus exclaim, 'What fungus could be more stupid? yet
these are the Atlases who are to uphold the tottering Church!'

'The monks had a pleasant time of it,' says Luther. 'Every brother had
two cans of beer and a quart of wine for his supper, with gingerbread,
to make him take to his liquor kindly. Thus the poor things came to look
like fiery angels.'

And more gravely, 'In the cloister rule the seven deadly
sins--covetousness, lasciviousness, uncleanness, hate, envy, idleness,
and the loathing of the service of God.'

Consider such men as these owning a third, a half, sometimes two-thirds
of the land in every country in Europe, and, in addition to their other
sins, neglecting all the duties attaching to this property--the woods
cut down and sold, the houses falling to ruin--unthrift, neglect, waste
everywhere and in everything--the shrewd making the most of their time,
which they had sense to see might be a short one--the rest dreaming on
in sleepy sensuality, dividing their hours between the chapel, the
pothouse, and the brothel.

I do not think that, in its main features, the truth of this sketch can
be impugned; and if it be just even in outline, then a reformation of
some kind or other was overwhelmingly necessary. Corruption beyond a
certain point becomes unendurable to the coarsest nostril. The
constitution of human things cannot away with it.

Something was to be done; but what, or how? There were three possible
courses.

Either the ancient discipline of the Church might be restored by the
heads of the Church themselves.

Or, secondly, a higher tone of feeling might gradually be introduced
among clergy and laity alike, by education and literary culture. The
discovery of the printing press had made possible a diffusion of
knowledge which had been unattainable in earlier ages. The
ecclesiastical constitution, like a sick human body, might recover its
tone if a better diet were prepared for it.

Or, lastly, the common sense of the laity might take the matter at once
into their own hands, and make free use of the pruning knife and the
sweeping brush. There might be much partial injustice, much violence,
much wrongheadedness; but the people would, at any rate, go direct to
the point, and the question was whether any other remedy would serve.

The first of these alternatives may at once be dismissed. The heads of
the Church were the last persons in the world to discover that anything
was wrong. People of that sort always are. For them the thing as it
existed answered excellently well. They had boundless wealth, and all
but boundless power. What could they ask for more? No monk drowsing over
his wine-pot was less disturbed by anxiety than nine out of ten of the
high dignitaries who were living on the eve of the Judgment Day, and
believed that their seat was established for them for ever.

The character of the great ecclesiastics of that day you may infer from
a single example. The Archbishop of Mayence was one of the most
enlightened Churchmen in Germany. He was a patron of the Renaissance, a
friend of Erasmus, a liberal, an intelligent, and, as times went, and
considering his trade, an honourable, high-minded man.

When the Emperor Maximilian died, and the imperial throne was vacant,
the Archbishop of Mayence was one of seven electors who had to choose a
new emperor.

There were two competitors--Francis the First and Maximilian's grandson,
afterwards the well-known Charles the Fifth.

Well, of the seven electors six were bribed. John Frederick of Saxony,
Luther's friend and protector, was the only one of the party who came
out of the business with clean hands.

But the Archbishop of Mayence took bribes six times alternately from
both the candidates. He took money as coolly as the most rascally
ten-pound householder in Yarmouth or Totnes, and finally drove a hard
bargain for his actual vote.

The grape does not grow upon the blackthorn; nor does healthy reform
come from high dignitaries like the Archbishop of Mayence.

The other aspect of the problem I shall consider in the following
Lectures.


LECTURE II.

In the year 1467--the year in which Charles the Bold became Duke of
Burgundy--four years before the great battle of Barnet, which
established our own fourth Edward on the English throne--about the time
when William Caxton was setting up his printing press at
Westminster--there was born at Rotterdam, on the 28th of October,
Desiderius Erasmus. His parents, who were middle-class people, were
well-to-do in the world. For some reason or other they were prevented
from marrying by the interference of relations. The father died soon
after in a cloister; the mother was left with her illegitimate infant,
whom she called first, after his father, Gerard; but afterwards, from
his beauty and grace, she changed his name--the words Desiderius
Erasmus, one with a Latin, the other with a Greek, derivation, meaning
the lovely or delightful one.

Not long after, the mother herself died also. The little Erasmus was the
heir of a moderate fortune; and his guardians, desiring to appropriate
it to themselves, endeavoured to force him into a convent at Brabant.

The thought of living and dying in a house of religion was dreadfully
unattractive; but an orphan boy's resistance was easily overcome. He was
bullied into yielding, and, when about twenty, took the vows.

The life of a monk, which was uninviting on the surface, was not more
lovely when seen from within.

'A monk's holy obedience,' Erasmus wrote afterwards, 'consists in--what?
In leading an honest, chaste, and sober life? Not the least. In
acquiring learning, in study, and industry? Still less. A monk may be a
glutton, a drunkard, a whoremonger, an ignorant, stupid, malignant,
envious brute, but he has broken no vow, he is within his holy
obedience. He has only to be the slave of a superior as good for nothing
as himself, and he is an excellent brother.'

The misfortune of his position did not check Erasmus's intellectual
growth. He was a brilliant, witty, sarcastic, mischievous youth. He did
not trouble himself to pine and mope; but, like a young thorough-bred in
a drove of asses, he used his heels pretty freely.

While he played practical jokes upon the unreverend fathers, he
distinguished himself equally by his appetite for knowledge. It was the
dawn of the Renaissance--the revival of learning. The discovery of
printing was reopening to modern Europe the great literature of Greece
and Rome, and the writings of the Christian fathers. For studies of this
kind, Erasmus, notwithstanding the disadvantages of cowl and frock,
displayed extraordinary aptitude. He taught himself Greek when Greek was
the language which, in the opinion of the monks, only the devils spoke
in the wrong place. His Latin was as polished as Cicero's; and at length
the Archbishop of Cambray heard of him, and sent him to the University
of Paris.

At Paris he found a world where life could be sufficiently pleasant, but
where his religious habit was every moment in his way. He was a priest,
and so far could not help himself. That ink-spot not all the waters of
the German Ocean could wash away. But he did not care for the low
debaucheries, where the frock and cowl were at home. His place was in
the society of cultivated men, who were glad to know him and to
patronise him; so he shook off his order, let his hair grow, and flung
away his livery.

The Archbishop's patronage was probably now withdrawn. Life in Paris was
expensive, and Erasmus had for several years to struggle with poverty.
We see him, however, for the most part--in his early letters--carrying a
bold front to fortune; desponding one moment, and larking the next with
a Paris grisette; making friends, enjoying good company, enjoying
especially good wine when he could get it; and, above all, satiating his
literary hunger at the library of the University.

In this condition, when about eight-and-twenty, he made acquaintance
with two young English noblemen who were travelling on the Continent,
Lord Mountjoy and one of the Greys.

Mountjoy, intensely attracted by his brilliance, took him for his tutor,
carried him over to England, and introduced him at the court of Henry
the Seventh. At once his fortune was made. He charmed every one, and in
turn he was himself delighted with the country and the people. English
character, English hospitality, English manners--everything English
except the beer--equally pleased him. In the young London men--the
lawyers, the noblemen, even in some of the clergy--he found his own
passion for learning. Sir Thomas More, who was a few years younger than
himself, became his dearest friend; and Warham, afterwards Archbishop of
Canterbury--Fisher, afterwards Bishop of Rochester--Colet, the famous
Dean of St. Paul's--the great Wolsey himself--recognised and welcomed
the rising star of European literature.

Money flowed in upon him. Warham gave him a benefice in Kent, which was
afterwards changed to a pension. Prince Henry, when he became King,
offered him--kings in those days were not bad friends to
literature--Henry offered him, if he would remain in England, a house
large enough to be called a palace, and a pension which, converted into
our money, would be a thousand pounds a year.

Erasmus, however, was a restless creature, and did not like to be caged
or tethered. He declined the King's terms, but Mountjoy settled a
pension on him instead. He had now a handsome income, and he understood
the art of enjoying it. He moved about as he pleased--now to Cambridge,
now to Oxford, and, as the humour took him, back again to Paris; now
staying with Sir Thomas More at Chelsea, now going a pilgrimage with
Dean Colet to Becket's tomb at Canterbury--but always studying, always
gathering knowledge, and throwing it out again, steeped in his own
mother wit, in shining Essays or Dialogues, which were the delight and
the despair of his contemporaries.

Everywhere, in his love of pleasure, in his habits of thought, in his
sarcastic scepticism, you see the healthy, clever, well-disposed,
tolerant, epicurean, intellectual man of the world.

He went, as I said, with Dean Colet to Becket's tomb. At a shrine about
Canterbury he was shown an old shoe which tradition called the Saint's.
At the tomb itself, the great sight was a handkerchief which a monk took
from among the relics, and offered it to the crowd to kiss. The
worshippers touched it in pious adoration, with clasped hands and
upturned eyes. If the thing was genuine, as Erasmus observed, it had but
served for the archbishop to wipe his nose with--and Dean Colet, a
puritan before his time, looked on with eyes flashing scorn, and
scarcely able to keep his hands off the exhibitors. But Erasmus smiled
kindly, reflecting that mankind were fools, and in some form or other
would remain fools. He took notice only of the pile of gold and jewels,
and concluded that so much wealth might prove dangerous to its
possessors.

The peculiarities of the English people interested and amused him. 'You
are going to England,' he wrote afterwards to a friend; 'you will not
fail to be pleased. You will find the great people there most agreeable
and gracious; only be careful not to presume upon their intimacy. They
will condescend to your level, but do not you therefore suppose that you
stand upon theirs. The noble lords are gods in their own eyes.'

'For the other classes, be courteous, give your right hand, do not take
the wall, do not push yourself. Smile on whom you please, but trust no
one that you do not know; above all, speak no evil of England to them.
They are proud of their country above all nations in the world, as they
have good reason to be.'

These directions might have been written yesterday. The manners of the
ladies have somewhat changed. 'English ladies,' says Erasmus, 'are
divinely pretty, and _too_ good-natured. They have an excellent custom
among them, that wherever you go the girls kiss you. They kiss you when
you come, they kiss you when you go, they kiss you at intervening
opportunities, and their lips are soft, warm, and delicious.' Pretty
well that, for a priest!

The custom, perhaps, was not quite so universal as Erasmus would have us
believe. His own coaxing ways may have had something to do with it. At
any rate, he found England a highly agreeable place of residence.

Meanwhile, his reputation as a writer spread over the world. Latin--the
language in which he wrote--was in universal use. It was the vernacular
of the best society in Europe, and no living man was so perfect a master
of it. His satire flashed about among all existing institutions,
scathing especially his old enemies the monks; while the great secular
clergy, who hated the religious orders, were delighted to see them
scourged, and themselves to have the reputation of being patrons of
toleration and reform.

Erasmus, as he felt his ground more sure under him, obtained from Julius
the Second a distinct release from his monastic vows; and, shortly
after, when the brilliant Leo succeeded to the tiara, and gathered about
him the magnificent cluster of artists who have made his era so
illustrious, the new Pope invited Erasmus to visit him at Rome, and
become another star in the constellation which surrounded the Papal
throne.

Erasmus was at this time forty years old--the age when ambition becomes
powerful in men, and takes the place of love of pleasure. He was
received at Rome with princely distinction, and he could have asked for
nothing--bishoprics, red hats, or red stockings--which would not have
been freely given to him if he would have consented to remain.

But he was too considerable a man to be tempted by finery; and the
Pope's livery, gorgeous though it might be, was but a livery after all.
Nothing which Leo the Tenth could do for Erasmus could add lustre to his
coronet. More money he might have had, but of money he had already
abundance, and outward dignity would have been dearly bought by gilded
chains. He resisted temptation; he preferred the northern air, where he
could breathe at liberty, and he returned to England, half inclined to
make his home there.

But his own sovereign laid claim to his services; the future emperor
recalled him to the Low Countries, settled a handsome salary upon him,
and established him at the University of Louvaine.

He was now in the zenith of his greatness. He had an income as large as
many an English nobleman. We find him corresponding with popes,
cardinals, kings, and statesmen; and as he grew older, his mind became
more fixed upon serious subjects. The ignorance and brutality of the
monks, the corruption of the spiritual courts, the absolute irreligion
in which the Church was steeped, gave him serious alarm. He had no
enthusiasms, no doctrinal fanaticisms, no sectarian beliefs or
superstitions. The breadth of his culture, his clear understanding, and
the worldly moderation of his temper, seemed to qualify him above living
men to conduct a temperate reform. He saw that the system around him was
pregnant with danger, and he resolved to devote what remained to him of
life to the introduction of a higher tone in the minds of the clergy.

The revival of learning had by this time alarmed the religious orders.
Literature and education, beyond the code of the theological text-books,
appeared simply devilish to them. When Erasmus returned to Louvaine, the
battle was raging over the north of Europe.

The Dominicans at once recognised in Erasmus their most dangerous enemy.
At first they tried to compel him to re-enter the order, but, strong in
the Pope's dispensation, he was so far able to defy them. They could
bark at his heels, but dared not come to closer quarters: and with his
temper slightly ruffled, but otherwise contented to despise them, he
took up boldly the task which he had set himself.

Copyright (c) 2007. topboookz.com. All rights reserved.