Henrik Ibsen - "John Gabriel Borkman"

Ruth Edna Kelley - "The Book of Hallowe'en"

George S. Harney - "David Lannarck, Midget"

Frederik van Eeden - "The Bride of Dreams"

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




'We kiss the old shoes of the saints,' he said, 'but we never read their
works.' He undertook the enormous labour of editing and translating
selections from the writings of the Fathers. The New Testament was as
little known as the lost books of Tacitus--all that the people knew of
the Gospels and the Epistles were the passages on which theologians had
built up the Catholic formulas. Erasmus published the text, and with it,
and to make it intelligible, a series of paraphrases, which rent away
the veil of traditional and dogmatic interpretation, and brought the
teaching of Christ and the Apostles into their natural relation with
reason and conscience.

In all this, although the monks might curse, he had countenance and
encouragement from the great ecclesiastics in all parts of Europe--and
it is highly curious to see the extreme freedom with which they allowed
him to propose to them his plans for a Reformation--we seem to be
listening to the wisest of modern broad Churchmen.

To one of his correspondents, an archbishop, he writes:--

'Let us have done with theological refinements. There is an excuse for
the Fathers, because the heretics forced them to define particular
points; but every definition is a misfortune, and for us to persevere in
the same way is sheer folly. Is no man to be admitted to grace who does
not know how the Father differs from the Son, and both from the Spirit?
or how the nativity of the Son differs from the procession of the
Spirit? Unless I forgive my brother his sins against me, God will not
forgive me my sins. Unless I have a pure heart--unless I put away envy,
hate, pride, avarice, lust, I shall not see God. But a man is not damned
because he cannot tell whether the Spirit has one principle or two. Has
he the fruits of the Spirit? That is the question. Is he patient, kind,
good, gentle, modest, temperate, chaste? Enquire if you will, but do not
define. True religion is peace, and we cannot have peace unless we leave
the conscience unshackled on obscure points on which certainty is
impossible. We hear now of questions being referred to the next
OEcumenical Council--better a great deal refer them to doomsday. Time
was, when a man's faith was looked for in his life, not in the Articles
which he professed. Necessity first brought Articles upon us, and ever
since, we have refined and refined till Christianity has become a thing
of words and creeds. Articles increase--sincerity vanishes
away--contention grows hot, and charity grows cold. Then comes in the
civil power, with stake and gallows, and men are forced to profess what
they do not believe, to pretend to love what in fact they hate, and to
say that they understand what in fact has no meaning for them.'

Again, to the Archbishop of Mayence:--

'Reduce the dogmas necessary to be believed, to the smallest possible
number; you can do it without danger to the realities of Christianity.
On other points, either discourage enquiry, or leave everyone free to
believe what he pleases--then we shall have no more quarrels, and
religion will again take hold of life. When you have done this, you can
correct the abuses of which the world with good reason complains. The
unjust judge heard the widow's prayer. You should not shut your ears to
the cries of those for whom Christ died. He did not die for the great
only, but for the poor and for the lowly. There need be no tumult. Do
you only set human affections aside, and let kings and princes lend
themselves heartily to the public good. But observe that the monks and
friars be allowed no voice; with these gentlemen the world has borne too
long. They care only for their own vanity, their own stomachs, their own
power; and they believe that if the people are enlightened, their
kingdom cannot stand.'

Once more to the Pope himself:--

'Let each man amend first his own wicked life. When he has done that,
and will amend his neighbour, let him put on Christian charity, which is
severe enough when severity is needed. If your holiness give power to
men who neither believe in Christ nor care for you, but think only of
their own appetites, I fear there will be danger. We can trust your
holiness, but there are bad men who will use your virtues as a cloke for
their own malice.'

That the spiritual rulers of Europe should have allowed a man like
Erasmus to use language such as this to them is a fact of supreme
importance. It explains the feeling of Goethe, that the world would have
gone on better had there been no Luther, and that the revival of
theological fanaticism did more harm than good.

But the question of questions is, what all this latitudinarian
philosophising, this cultivated epicurean gracefulness would have come
to if left to itself; or rather, what was the effect which it was
inevitably producing? If you wish to remove an old building without
bringing it in ruins about your ears, you must begin at the top, remove
the stones gradually downwards, and touch the foundation last. But
latitudinarianism loosens the elementary principles of theology. It
destroys the premises on which the dogmatic system rests. It would beg
the question to say that this would in itself have been undesirable; but
the practical effect of it, as the world then stood, would have only
been to make the educated into infidels, and to leave the multitude to a
convenient but debasing superstition.

The monks said that Erasmus laid the egg, and Luther hatched a
cockatrice. Erasmus resented deeply such an account of his work; but it
was true after all. The sceptical philosophy is the most powerful of
solvents, but it has no principle of organic life in it; and what of
truth there was in Erasmus's teaching had to assume a far other form
before it was available for the reinvigoration of religion. He himself,
in his clearer moments, felt his own incapacity, and despaired of making
an impression on the mass of ignorance with which he saw himself
surrounded.

'The stupid monks,' he writes, 'say mass as a cobbler makes a shoe; they
come to the altar reeking from their filthy pleasures. Confession with
the monks is a cloke to steal the people's money, to rob girls of their
virtue, and commit other crimes too horrible to name! Yet these people
are the tyrants of Europe. The Pope himself is afraid of them.'

'Beware!' he says to an impetuous friend, 'beware how you offend the
monks. You have to do with an enemy that cannot be slain; an order never
dies, and they will not rest till they have destroyed you.'

The heads of the Church might listen politely, but Erasmus had no
confidence in them. 'Never,' he says, 'was there a time when divines
were greater fools, or popes and prelates more worldly.' Germany was
about to receive a signal illustration of the improvement which it was
to look for from liberalism and intellectual culture.

We are now on the edge of the great conflagration. Here we must leave
Erasmus for the present. I must carry you briefly over the history of
the other great person who was preparing to play his part on the stage.
You have seen something of what Erasmus was; you must turn next to the
companion picture of Martin Luther. You will observe in how many points
their early experiences touch, as if to show more vividly the contrast
between the two men.

Sixteen years after the birth of Erasmus, therefore in the year 1483,
Martin Luther came into the world in a peasant's cottage, at Eisleben,
in Saxony. By peasant, you need not understand a common boor. Hans
Luther, the father, was a thrifty, well-to-do man for his station in
life--adroit with his hands, and able to do many useful things, from
farm work to digging in the mines. The family life was strict and
stern--rather too stern, as Martin thought in later life.

'Be temperate with your children,' he said, long after, to a friend;
'punish them if they lie or steal, but be just in what you do. It is a
lighter sin to take pears and apples than to take money. I shudder when
I think of what I went through myself. My mother beat me about some nuts
once till the blood came. I had a terrible time of it, but she meant
well.'

At school, too, he fell into rough hands, and the recollection of his
sufferings made him tender ever after with young boys and girls.

'Never be hard with children,' he used to say. 'Many a fine character
has been ruined by the stupid brutality of pedagogues. The parts of
speech are a boy's pillory. I was myself flogged fifteen times in one
forenoon over the conjugation of a verb. Punish if you will, but be
kind too, and let the sugar-plum go with the rod.' This is not the
language of a demagogue or a fanatic; it is the wise thought of a
tender, human-hearted man.

At seventeen, he left school for the University at Erfurt. It was then
no shame for a poor scholar to maintain himself by alms. Young Martin
had a rich noble voice and a fine ear, and by singing ballads in the
streets he found ready friends and help. He was still uncertain with
what calling he should take up, when it happened that a young friend was
killed at his side by lightning.

Erasmus was a philosopher. A powder magazine was once blown up by
lightning in a town where Erasmus was staying, and a house of infamous
character was destroyed. The inhabitants saw in what had happened the
Divine anger against sin. Erasmus told them that if there was any anger
in the matter, it was anger merely with the folly which had stored
powder in an exposed situation.

Luther possessed no such premature intelligence. He was distinguished
from other boys only by the greater power of his feelings and the
vividness of his imagination. He saw in his friend's death the immediate
hand of the great Lord of the universe. His conscience was terrified. A
life-long penitence seemed necessary to atone for the faults of his
boyhood. He too, like Erasmus, became a monk, not forced into it--for
his father knew better what the holy men were like, and had no wish to
have son of his among them--but because the monk of Martin's imagination
spent his nights and days upon the stones in prayer; and Martin, in the
heat of his repentance, longed to be kneeling at his side.

In this mood he entered the Augustine monastery at Erfurt. He was full
of an overwhelming sense of his own wretchedness and sinfulness. Like
St. Paul, he was crying to be delivered from the body of death which he
carried about him. He practised all possible austerities. He, if no one
else, mortified his flesh with fasting. He passed nights in the chancel
before the altar, or on his knees on the floor of his cell. He weakened
his body till his mind wandered, and he saw ghosts and devils. Above
all, he saw the flaming image of his own supposed guilt. God required
that he should keep the law in all points. He had not so kept the
law--could not so keep the law--and therefore he believed that he was
damned. One morning, he was found senseless and seemingly dead; a
brother played to him on a flute, and soothed his senses back to
consciousness.

It was long since any such phenomenon had appeared among the rosy friars
of Erfurt. They could not tell what to make of him. Staupitz, the prior,
listened to his accusations of himself in confession. 'My good fellow,'
he said, 'don't be so uneasy; you have committed no sins of the least
consequence; you have not killed anybody, or committed adultery, or
things of that sort. If you sin to some purpose, it is right that you
should think about it, but don't make mountains out of trifles.'

Very curious: to the commonplace man the uncommonplace is for ever
unintelligible. What was the good of all that excitement--that agony of
self-reproach for little things? None at all, if the object is only to
be an ordinary good sort of man--if a decent fulfilment of the round of
common duties is the be-all and the end-all of human life on earth.

The plague came by-and-by into the town. The commonplace clergy ran
away--went to their country-houses, went to the hills, went
anywhere--and they wondered in the same way why Luther would not go with
them. They admired him and liked him. They told him his life was too
precious to be thrown away. He answered, quite simply, that his place
was with the sick and dying; a monk's life was no great matter. The sun
he did not doubt would continue to shine, whatever became of him. 'I am
no St. Paul,' he said; 'I am afraid of death; but there are things worse
than death, and if I die, I die.'

Even a Staupitz could not but feel that he had an extraordinary youth in
his charge. To divert his mind from feeding upon itself, he devised a
mission for him abroad, and brother Martin was despatched on business of
the convent to Rome.

Luther too, like Erasmus, was to see Rome; but how different the figures
of the two men there! Erasmus goes with servants and horses, the
polished, successful man of the world. Martin Luther trudges penniless
and barefoot across the Alps, helped to a meal and a night's rest at the
monasteries along the road, or begging, if the convents fail him, at the
farm-houses.

He was still young, and too much occupied with his own sins to know much
of the world outside him. Erasmus had no dreams. He knew the hard truth
on most things. But Rome, to Luther's eager hopes, was the city of the
saints, and the court and palace of the Pope fragrant with the odours of
Paradise. 'Blessed Rome,' he cried, as he entered the gate--'Blessed
Rome, sanctified with the blood of martyrs!'

Alas! the Rome of reality was very far from blessed. He remained long
enough to complete his disenchantment. The cardinals, with their gilded
chariots and their parasols of peacocks' plumes, were poor
representatives of the apostles. The gorgeous churches and more gorgeous
rituals, the pagan splendour of the paintings, the heathen gods still
almost worshipped in the adoration of the art which had formed them, to
Luther, whose heart was heavy with thoughts of man's depravity, were
utterly horrible. The name of religion was there: the thinnest veil was
scarcely spread over the utter disbelief with which God and Christ were
at heart regarded. Culture enough there was. It was the Rome of Raphael
and Michael Angelo, of Perugino, and Benvenuto; but to the poor German
monk, who had come there to find help for his suffering soul, what was
culture?

He fled at the first moment that he could. 'Adieu! Rome,' he said; 'let
all who would lead a holy life depart from Rome. Everything is permitted
in Rome except to be an honest man.' He had no thought of leaving the
Roman Church. To a poor monk like him, to talk of leaving the Church was
like talking of leaping off the planet. But perplexed and troubled he
returned to Saxony; and his friend Staupitz, seeing clearly that a
monastery was no place for him, recommended him to the Elector as
Professor of Philosophy at Wittenberg.

The senate of Wittenberg gave him the pulpit of the town church, and
there at once he had room to show what was in him. 'This monk,' said
some one who heard him, 'is a marvellous fellow. He has strange eyes,
and will give the doctors trouble by-and-by.'

He had read deeply, especially he had read that rare and almost unknown
book, the 'New Testament.' He was not cultivated like Erasmus. Erasmus
spoke the most polished Latin. Luther spoke and wrote his own vernacular
German. The latitudinarian philosophy, the analytical acuteness, the
sceptical toleration of Erasmus were alike strange and distasteful to
him. In all things he longed only to know the truth--to shake off and
hurl from him lies and humbug.

Superstitious he was. He believed in witches and devils and fairies--a
thousand things without basis in fact, which Erasmus passed by in
contemptuous indifference. But for things which were really true--true
as nothing else in this world, or any world, is true--the justice of
God, the infinite excellence of good, the infinite hatefulness of
evil--these things he believed and felt with a power of passionate
conviction to which the broader, feebler mind of the other was for ever
a stranger.

We come now to the memorable year 1517, when Luther was thirty-five
years old. A new cathedral was in progress at Rome. Michael Angelo had
furnished Leo the Tenth with the design of St. Peter's; and the question
of questions was to find money to complete the grandest structure which
had ever been erected by man.

Pope Leo was the most polished and cultivated of mankind. The work to be
done was to be the most splendid which art could produce. The means to
which the Pope had recourse will serve to show us how much all that
would have done for us.

You remember what I told you about indulgences. The notable device of
his Holiness was to send distinguished persons about Europe with sacks
of indulgences. Indulgences and dispensations! Dispensations to eat meat
on fast-days--dispensations to marry one's near relation--dispensations
for anything and everything which the faithful might wish to purchase
who desired forbidden pleasures. The dispensations were simply
scandalous. The indulgences--well, if a pious Catholic is asked nowadays
what they were, he will say that they were the remission of the penances
which the Church inflicts upon earth; but it is also certain that they
would have sold cheap if the people had thought that this was all that
they were to get by them. As the thing was represented by the spiritual
hawkers who disposed of these wares, they were letters of credit on
heaven. When the great book was opened, the people believed that these
papers would be found entire on the right side of the account.
Debtor--so many murders, so many robberies, lies, slanders, or
debaucheries. Creditor--the merits of the saints placed to the account
of the delinquent by the Pope's letters, in consideration of value
received.

This is the way in which the pardon system was practically worked. This
is the way in which it is worked still, where the same superstitions
remain.

If one had asked Pope Leo whether he really believed in these pardons of
his, he would have said officially that the Church had always held that
the Pope had power to grant them.

Had he told the truth, he would have added privately that if the people
chose to be fools, it was not for him to disappoint them.

The collection went on. The money of the faithful came in plentifully;
and the pedlars going their rounds appeared at last in Saxony.

The Pope had bought the support of the Archbishop of Mayence, Erasmus's
friend, by promising him half the spoil which was gathered in his
province. The agent was the Dominican monk Tetzel, whose name has
acquired a forlorn notoriety in European history.

His stores were opened in town after town. He entered in state. The
streets everywhere were hung with flags. Bells were pealed; nuns and
monks walked in procession before and after him, while he himself sate
in a chariot, with the Papal Bull on a velvet cushion in front of him.
The sale-rooms were the churches. The altars were decorated, the candles
lighted, the arms of St. Peter blazoned conspicuously on the roof.
Tetzel from the pulpit explained the efficacy of his medicines; and if
any profane person doubted their power, he was threatened with
excommunication.

Acolytes walked through the crowds, clinking their plates and crying,
'Buy! buy!' The business went as merry as a marriage bell till the
Dominican came near to Wittenberg.

Half a century before, such a spectacle would have excited no particular
attention. The few who saw through the imposition would have kept their
thoughts to themselves; the many would have paid their money, and in a
month all would have been forgotten.

But the fight between the men of letters and the monks, the writings of
Erasmus and Reuchlin, the satires of Ulric von Hutten, had created a
silent revolution in the minds of the younger laity.

A generation had grown to manhood of whom the Church authorities knew
nothing; and the whole air of Germany, unsuspected by pope or prelate,
was charged with electricity.

Had Luther stood alone, he, too, would probably have remained silent.
What was he, a poor, friendless, solitary monk, that he should set
himself against the majesty of the triple crown?

However hateful the walls of a dungeon, a man of sense confined alone
there does not dash his hands against the stones.

But Luther knew that his thoughts were the thoughts of thousands. Many
wrong things, as we all know, have to be endured in this world.
Authority is never very angelic; and moderate injustice, a moderate
quantity of lies, is more tolerable than anarchy.

But it is with human things as it is with the great icebergs which drift
southward out of the frozen seas. They swim two-thirds under water, and
one-third above; and so long as the equilibrium is sustained, you would
think that they were as stable as the rocks. But the sea-water is warmer
than the air. Hundreds of fathoms down, the tepid current washes the
base of the berg. Silently in those far deeps the centre of gravity is
changed; and then, in a moment, with one vast roll, the enormous mass
heaves over, and the crystal peaks which had been glancing so proudly in
the sunlight, are buried in the ocean for ever.

Such a process as this had been going on in Germany, and Luther knew it,
and knew that the time was come for him to speak. Fear had not kept him
back. The danger to himself would be none the less because he would have
the people at his side. The fiercer the thunderstorm, the greater peril
to the central figure who stands out above the rest exposed to it. But
he saw that there was hope at last of a change; and for himself--as he
said in the plague--if he died, he died.

Erasmus admitted frankly for himself that he did not like danger.

'As to me,' he wrote to Archbishop Warham, 'I have no inclination to
risk my life for truth. We have not all strength for martyrdom; and if
trouble come, I shall imitate St. Peter. Popes and emperors must settle
the creeds. If they settle them well, so much the better; if ill, I
shall keep on the safe side.'

That is to say, truth was not the first necessity to Erasmus. He would
prefer truth, if he could have it. If not, he could get on moderately
well upon falsehood. Luther could not. No matter what the danger to
himself, if he could smite a lie upon the head and kill it, he was
better pleased than by a thousand lives. We hear much of Luther's
doctrine about faith. Stripped of theological verbiage, that doctrine
means this.

Reason says that, on the whole, truth and justice are desirable things.
They make men happier in themselves, and make society more prosperous.
But there reason ends, and men will not die for principles of utility.
Faith says that between truth and lies, there is an infinite difference:
one is of God, the other of Satan; one is eternally to be loved, the
other eternally to be abhorred. It cannot say why, in language
intelligible to reason. It is the voice of the nobler nature in man
speaking out of his heart.

While Tetzel, with his bull and his gilt car, was coming to Wittenberg,
Luther, loyal still to authority while there was a hope that authority
would be on the side of right, wrote to the Archbishop of Mayence to
remonstrate.

The archbishop, as we know, was to have a share of Tetzel's spoils; and
what were the complaints of a poor insignificant monk to a supreme
archbishop who was in debt and wanted money?

The Archbishop of Mayence flung the letter into his waste-paper basket;
and Luther made his solemn appeal from earthly dignitaries to the
conscience of the German people. He set up his protest on the church
door at Wittenberg; and, in ninety-five propositions he challenged the
Catholic Church to defend Tetzel and his works.

The Pope's indulgences, he said, cannot take away sins. God alone remits
sins; and He pardons those who are penitent, without help from man's
absolutions.

The Church may remit penalties which the Church inflicts. But the
Church's power is in this world only, and does not reach to purgatory.

If God has thought fit to place a man in purgatory, who shall say that
it is good for him to be taken out of purgatory? who shall say that he
himself desires it?

True repentance does not shrink from chastisement. True repentance
rather loves chastisement.

The bishops are asleep. It is better to give to the poor than to buy
indulgences; and he who sees his neighbour in want, and instead of
helping his neighbour buys a pardon for himself, is doing what is
displeasing to God. Who is this man who dares to say that for so many
crowns the soul of a sinner can be made whole?

These, and like these, were Luther's propositions. Little guessed the
Catholic prelates the dimensions of the act which had been done. The
Pope, when he saw the theses, smiled in good-natured contempt. 'A
drunken German wrote them,' he said; 'when he has slept off his wine, he
will be of another mind.'

Tetzel bayed defiance; the Dominican friars took up the quarrel; and
Hochstrat of Cologne, Reuchlin's enemy, clamoured for fire and faggot.

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