William Hayley - "Ballads"

Miss Mant - "Christmas, A Happy Time"

David Hume et al - "An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding"

David Starr Jordan - "The Call of the Twentieth Century"

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




They do not ask whether those whom they address have wide knowledge of
history, or science, or philosophy; they ask rather that they shall be
honest, that they shall be brave, that they shall be true to the common
light which God has given to all His children. They know well that
conscience is no exceptional privilege of the great or the cultivated,
that to be generous and unselfish is no prerogative of rank or
intellect.

Erasmus considered that, for the vulgar, a lie might be as good as
truth, and often better. A lie, ascertained to be a lie, to Luther was
deadly poison--poison to him, and poison to all who meddled with it. In
his own genuine greatness, he was too humble to draw insolent
distinctions in his own favour; or to believe that any one class on
earth is of more importance than another in the eyes of the Great Maker
of them all.

Well, then, you know what I mean by faith, and what I mean by intellect.
It was not that Luther was without intellect. He was less subtle, less
learned, than Erasmus; but in mother wit, in elasticity, in force, and
imaginative power, he was as able a man as ever lived. Luther created
the German language as an instrument of literature. His translation of
the Bible is as rich and grand as our own, and his table talk as full of
matter as Shakespeare's plays.

Again; you will mistake me if you think I represent Erasmus as a man
without conscience, or belief in God and goodness. But in Luther that
belief was a certainty; in Erasmus it was only a high probability--and
the difference between the two is not merely great, it is infinite. In
Luther, it was the root; in Erasmus, it was the flower. In Luther, it
was the first principle of life; in Erasmus, it was an inference which
might be taken away, and yet leave the world a very tolerable and
habitable place after all.

You see the contrast in their early lives. You see Erasmus--light,
bright, sarcastic, fond of pleasure, fond of society, fond of wine and
kisses, and intellectual talk and polished company. You see Luther
throwing himself into the cloister, that he might subdue his will to the
will of God; prostrate in prayer, in nights of agony, and distracting
his easy-going confessor with the exaggerated scruples of his
conscience.

You see it in the effects of their teaching. You see Erasmus addressing
himself with persuasive eloquence to kings, and popes, and prelates; and
for answer, you see Pope Leo sending Tetzel over Germany with his
carriage-load of indulgences. You see Erasmus's dearest friend, our own
gifted admirable Sir Thomas More, taking his seat beside the bishops and
sending poor Protestant artisans to the stake.

You see Luther, on the other side, standing out before the world, one
lone man, with all authority against him--taking lies by the throat, and
Europe thrilling at his words, and saying after him, 'The reign of
Imposture shall end.'

Let us follow the course of Erasmus after the tempest had broken.

He knew Luther to be right. Luther had but said what Erasmus had been
all his life convinced of, and Luther looked to see him come forward and
take his place at his side. Had Erasmus done so, the course of things
would have been far happier and better. His prodigious reputation would
have given the Reformers the influence with the educated which they had
won for themselves with the multitude, and the Pope would have been left
without a friend to the north of the Alps. But there would have been
some danger--danger to the leaders, if certainty of triumph to the
cause--and Erasmus had no gift for martyrdom.

His first impulse was generous. He encouraged the elector, as we have
seen, to protect Luther from the Pope. 'I looked on Luther,' he wrote to
Duke George of Saxe, 'as a necessary evil in the corruption of the
Church; a medicine, bitter and drastic, from which sounder health would
follow.'

And again, more boldly: 'Luther has taken up the cause of honesty and
good sense against abominations which are no longer tolerable. His
enemies are men under whose worthlessness the Christian world has
groaned too long.'

So to the heads of the Church he wrote, pressing them to be moderate and
careful:--

'I neither approve Luther nor condemn him,' he said to the Archbishop of
Mayence; 'if he is innocent, he ought not to be oppressed by the
factions of the wicked; if he is in error, he should be answered, not
destroyed. The theologians'--observe how true they remain to the
universal type in all times and in all countries--'the theologians do
not try to answer him. They do but raise an insane and senseless
clamour, and shriek and curse. Heresy, heretic, heresiarch, schismatic,
Antichrist--these are the words which are in the mouths of all of them;
and, of course, they condemn without reading. I warned them what they
were doing. I told them to scream less, and to think more. Luther's life
they admit to be innocent and blameless. Such a tragedy I never saw. The
most humane men are thirsting for his blood, and they would rather kill
him than mend him. The Dominicans are the worst, and are more knaves
than fools. In old times, even a heretic was quietly listened to. If he
recanted, he was absolved; if he persisted, he was at worst
excommunicated. Now they will have nothing but blood. Not to agree with
them is heresy. To know Greek is heresy. To speak good Latin is heresy.
Whatever they do not understand is heresy. Learning, they pretend, has
given birth to Luther, though Luther has but little of it. Luther thinks
more of the Gospel than of scholastic divinity, and that is his crime.
This is plain at least, that the best men everywhere are those who are
least offended with him.'

Even to Pope Leo, in the midst of his fury, Erasmus wrote bravely;
separating himself from Luther, yet deprecating violence. 'Nothing,' he
said, 'would so recommend the new teaching as the howling of fools:'
while to a member of Charles's council he insisted that 'severity had
been often tried in such cases and had always failed; unless Luther was
encountered calmly and reasonably, a tremendous convulsion was
inevitable.'

Wisely said all this, but it presumed that those whom he was addressing
were reasonable men; and high officials, touched in their pride, are a
class of persons of whom Solomon may have been thinking when he said,
'Let a bear robbed of her whelps meet a man rather than a fool in his
folly.'

So to Luther, so to the people, Erasmus preached moderation. It was like
preaching to the winds in a hurricane. The typhoon itself is not wilder
than human creatures when once their passions are stirred. You cannot
check them; but, if you are brave, you can guide them wisely. And this,
Erasmus had not the heart to do.

He said at the beginning, 'I will not countenance revolt against
authority. A bad government is better than none.' But he said at the
same time, 'You bishops, cease to be corrupt: you popes and cardinals,
reform your wicked courts: you monks, leave your scandalous lives, and
obey the rules of your order, so you may recover the respect of mankind,
and be obeyed and loved as before.'

When he found that the case was desperate; that his exhortations were
but words addressed to the winds; that corruption had tainted the blood;
that there was no hope except in revolution--as, indeed, in his heart he
knew from the first that there was none--then his place ought to have
been with Luther.

But Erasmus, as the tempest rose, could but stand still in feeble
uncertainty. The responsibilities of his reputation weighed him down.

The Lutherans said, 'You believe as we do.' The Catholics said, 'You are
a Lutheran at heart; if you are not, prove it by attacking Luther.'

He grew impatient. He told lies. He said he had not read Luther's books,
and had no time to read them. What was he, he said, that he should
meddle in such a quarrel. He was the vine and the fig tree of the Book
of Judges. The trees said to them, Rule over us. The vine and the fig
tree answered, they would not leave their sweetness for such a thankless
office. 'I am a poor actor,' he said; 'I prefer to be a spectator of the
play.'

But he was sore at heart, and bitter with disappointment. All had been
going on so smoothly--literature was reviving, art and science were
spreading, the mind of the world was being reformed in the best sense by
the classics of Greece and Rome, and now an apple of discord had been
flung out into Europe.

The monks who had fought against enlightenment could point to the
confusion as a fulfilment of their prophecies; and he, and all that he
had done, was brought to disrepute.

To protect himself from the Dominicans, he was forced to pretend to an
orthodoxy which he did not possess. Were all true which Luther had
written, he pretended that it ought not to have been said, or should
have been addressed in a learned language to the refined and educated.

He doubted whether it was not better on the whole to teach the people
lies for their good, when truth was beyond their comprehension. Yet he
could not for all that wish the Church to be successful.

'I fear for that miserable Luther,' he said; 'the popes and princes are
furious with him. His own destruction would be no great matter, but if
the monks triumph there will be no bearing them. They will never rest
till they have rooted learning out of the land. The Pope expects _me_ to
write against Luther. The orthodox, it appears, can call him names--call
him blockhead, fool, heretic, toadstool, schismatic, and Antichrist--but
they must come to me to answer his arguments.'

'Oh! that this had never been,' he wrote to our own Archbishop Warham.
'Now there is no hope for any good. It is all over with quiet learning,
thought, piety, and progress; violence is on one side and folly on the
other; and they accuse me of having caused it all. If I joined Luther I
could only perish with him, and I do not mean to run my neck into a
halter. Popes and emperors must decide matters. I will accept what is
good, and do as I can with the rest. Peace on any terms is better than
the justest war.'

Erasmus never stooped to real baseness. He was too clever, too
genuine--he had too great a contempt for worldly greatness. They offered
him a bishopric if he would attack Luther. He only laughed at them. What
was a bishopric to him? He preferred a quiet life among his books at
Louvaine.

But there was no more quiet for Erasmus at Louvaine or anywhere. Here is
a scene between him and the Prior of the Dominicans in the presence of
the Rector of the University.

The Dominican had preached at Erasmus in the University pulpit. Erasmus
complained to the rector, and the rector invited the Dominican to defend
himself. Erasmus tells the story.

'I sate on one side and the monk on the other, the rector between us to
prevent our scratching.

'The monk asked what the matter was, and said he had done no harm.

'I said he had told lies of me, and that was harm.

'It was after dinner. The holy man was flushed. He turned purple.

'"Why do you abuse monks in your books?" he said.

'"I spoke of your order," I answered. "I did not mention you. You
denounced me by name as a friend of Luther."

'He raged like a madman. "You are the cause of all this trouble," he
said; "you are a chameleon, you can twist everything."

'"You see what a fellow he is," said I, turning to the rector. "If it
comes to calling names, why I can do that too; but let us be
reasonable."

'He still roared and cursed; he vowed he would never rest till he had
destroyed Luther.

'I said he might curse Luther till he burst himself if he pleased. I
complained of his cursing me.

'He answered, that if I did not agree with Luther, I ought to say so,
and write against him.

'"Why should I?" urged I. "The quarrel is none of mine. Why should I
irritate Luther against me, when he has horns and knows how to use
them?"

'"Well, then," said he, "if you will not write, at least you can say
that we Dominicans have had the best of the argument."

'"How can I do that?" replied I. "You have burnt his books, but I never
heard that you had answered them."

'He almost spat upon me. I understand that there is to be a form of
prayer for the conversion of Erasmus and Luther.'

But Erasmus was not to escape so easily. Adrian the Sixth, who succeeded
Leo, was his old schoolfellow, and implored his assistance in terms
which made refusal impossible. Adrian wanted Erasmus to come to him to
Rome. He was too wary to walk into the wolf's den. But Adrian required
him to write, and reluctantly he felt that he must comply.

What was he to say?

'If his Holiness will set about reform in good earnest,' he wrote to the
Pope's secretary, 'and if he will not be too hard on Luther, I may,
perhaps, do good; but what Luther writes of the tyranny, the corruption,
the covetousness of the Roman court, would, my friend, that it was not
true.'

To Adrian himself, Erasmus addressed a letter really remarkable.

'I cannot go to your Holiness,' he said, 'King Calculus will not let me.
I have dreadful health, which this tornado has not improved. I, who was
the favourite of everybody, am now cursed by everybody--at Louvaine by
the monks; in Germany by the Lutherans. I have fallen into trouble in my
old age, like a mouse into a pot of pitch. You say, Come to Rome; you
might as well say to the crab, Fly. The crab says, Give me wings; I say,
Give me back my health and my youth. If I write calmly against Luther I
shall be called lukewarm; if I write as he does, I shall stir a hornet's
nest. People think he can be put down by force. The more force you try,
the stronger he will grow. Such disorders cannot be cured in that way.
The Wickliffites in England were put down, but the fire smouldered.

'If you mean to use violence you have no need of me; but mark this--if
monks and theologians think only of themselves, no good will come of it.
Look rather into the causes of all this confusion, and apply your
remedies there. Send for the best and wisest men from all parts of
Christendom and take their advice.'

Tell a crab to fly. Tell a pope to be reasonable. You must relieve him
of his infallibility if you want him to act like a sensible man. Adrian
could undertake no reforms, and still besought Erasmus to take arms for
him.

Erasmus determined to gratify Adrian with least danger to himself and
least injury to Luther.

'I remember Uzzah, and am afraid,' he said, in his quizzing way; 'it is
not everyone who is allowed to uphold the ark. Many a wise man has
attacked Luther, and what has been effected? The Pope curses, the
emperor threatens; there are prisons, confiscations, faggots; and all is
vain. What can a poor pigmy like me do?

* * * * *

'The world has been besotted with ceremonies. Miserable monks have ruled
all, entangling men's consciences for their own benefit. Dogma has been
heaped on dogma. The bishops have been tyrants, the Pope's commissaries
have been rascals. Luther has been an instrument of God's displeasure,
like Pharaoh or Nebuchadnezzar, or the Caesars, and I shall not attack
him on such grounds as these.'

Erasmus was too acute to defend against Luther the weak point of a bad
cause. He would not declare for him--but he would not go over to his
enemies. Yet, unless he quarrelled with Adrian, he could not be
absolutely silent; so he chose a subject to write upon on which all
schools of theology, Catholic or Protestant--all philosophers, all
thinkers of whatever kind, have been divided from the beginning of time:
fate and free will, predestination and the liberty of man--a problem
which has no solution--which may be argued even from eternity to
eternity.

The reason of the selection was obvious. Erasmus wished to please the
Pope and not exasperate Luther. Of course he pleased neither, and
offended both.

Luther, who did not comprehend his motive, was needlessly angry. Adrian
and the monks were openly contemptuous. Sick of them and their quarrels,
he grew weary of the world, and began to wish to be well out of it.

It is characteristic of Erasmus that, like many highly-gifted men, but
unlike all theologians, he expressed a hope for sudden death, and
declared it to be one of the greatest blessings which a human creature
can receive.

Do not suppose that he broke down or showed the white feather to
fortune's buffets. Through all storms he stuck bravely to his own proper
work; editing classics, editing the Fathers, writing paraphrases--still
doing for Europe what no other man could have done.

The Dominicans hunted him away from Louvaine. There was no living for
him in Germany for the Protestants. He suffered dreadfully from the
stone, too, and in all ways had a cruel time of it. Yet he continued,
for all that, to make life endurable.

He moved about in Switzerland and on the Upper Rhine. The lakes, the
mountains, the waterfalls, the villas on the hill slopes, delighted
Erasmus when few people else cared for such things. He was particular
about his wine. The vintage of Burgundy was as new blood in his veins,
and quickened his pen into brightness and life.

The German wines he liked worse--for this point among others, which is
curious to observe in those days. The great capitalist winegrowers,
anti-Reformers all of them, were people without conscience and humanity,
and adulterated their liquors. Of course they did. They believed in
nothing but money, and this was the way to make money.

'The water they mix with the wine,' Erasmus says, 'is the least part of
the mischief. They put in lime, and alum, and resin, and sulphur, and
salt--and then they say it is good enough for heretics.'

Observe the practical issue of religious corruption. Show me a people
where trade is dishonest, and I will show you a people where religion is
a sham.

'We hang men that steal money,' Erasmus exclaimed, writing doubtless
with the remembrance of a stomach-ache. 'These wretches steal our money
and our lives too, and get off scot free.'

He settled at last at Basle, which the storm had not yet reached, and
tried to bury himself among his books. The shrieks of the conflict,
however, still troubled his ears. He heard his own name still cursed,
and he could not bear it or sit quiet under it.

His correspondence was still enormous. The high powers still appealed to
him for advice and help: of open meddling he would have no more; he did
not care, he said, to make a post of himself for every dog of a
theologian to defile. Advice, however, he continued to give in the old
style.

'Put down the preachers on both sides. Fill the pulpits with men who
will kick controversy into the kennel, and preach piety and good
manners. Teach nothing in the schools but what bears upon life and duty.
Punish those who break the peace, and punish no one else; and when the
new opinions have taken root, allow liberty of conscience.'

Perfection of wisdom; but a wisdom which, unfortunately, was three
centuries at least out of date, which even now we have not grown big
enough to profit by. The Catholic princes and bishops were at work with
fire and faggot. The Protestants were pulling down monasteries, and
turning the monks and nuns out into the world. The Catholics declared
that Erasmus was as much to blame as Luther. The Protestants held him
responsible for the persecutions, and insisted, not without reason, that
if Erasmus had been true to his conscience, the whole Catholic world
must have accepted the Reformation.

He suffered bitterly under these attacks upon him. He loved quiet--and
his ears were deafened with clamour. He liked popularity--and he was the
best abused person in Europe. Others who suffered in the same way he
could advise to leave the black-coated jackdaws to their noise--but he
could not follow his own counsel. When the curs were at his heels, he
could not restrain himself from lashing out at them; and, from his
retreat at Basle, his sarcasms flashed out like jagged points of
lightning.

Describing an emeute, and the burning of an image of a saint, 'They
insulted the poor image so,' he said, 'it is a marvel there was no
miracle. The saint worked so many in the good old times.'

When Luther married an escaped nun, the Catholics exclaimed that
Antichrist would be born from such an incestuous intercourse. 'Nay,'
Erasmus said, 'if monk and nun produce Antichrist, there must have been
legions of Antichrists these many years.'

More than once he was tempted to go over openly to Luther--not from a
noble motive, but, as he confessed, 'to make those furies feel the
difference between him and them.'

He was past sixty, with broken health and failing strength. He thought
of going back to England, but England had by this time caught fire, and
Basle had caught fire. There was no peace on earth.

'The horse has his heels,' he said, when advised to be quiet, 'the dog
his teeth, the hedgehog his spines, the bee his sting. I myself have my
tongue and my pen, and why should I not use them?'

Yet to use them to any purpose now, he must take a side, and, sorely
tempted as he was, he could not.

With the negative part of the Protestant creed he sympathised heartily;
but he did not understand Luther's doctrine of faith, because he had
none of his own, and he disliked it as a new dogma.

He regarded Luther's movement as an outburst of commonplace revolution,
caused by the folly and wickedness of the authorities, but with no
organising vitality in itself; and his chief distress, as we gather from
his later letters, was at his own treatment. He had done his best for
both sides. He had failed, and was abused by everybody.

Thus passed away the last years of one of the most gifted men that
Europe has ever seen. I have quoted many of his letters. I will add one
more passage, written near the end of his life, very touching and
pathetic:--

'Hercules,' he said, 'could not fight two monsters at once; while I,
poor wretch, have lions, cerberuses, cancers, scorpions every day at my
sword's point; not to mention smaller vermin--rats, mosquitoes, bugs,
and fleas. My troops of friends are turned to enemies. At dinner-tables
or social gatherings, in churches and king's courts, in public carriage
or public flyboat, scandal pursues me, and calumny defiles my name.
Every goose now hisses at Erasmus; and it is worse than being stoned,
once for all, like Stephen, or shot with arrows like Sebastian.

'They attack me now even for my Latin style, and spatter me with
epigrams. Fame I would have parted with; but to be the sport of
blackguards--to be pelted with potsherds and dirt and ordure--is not
this worse than death?

'There is no rest for me in my age, unless I join Luther; and I cannot,
for I cannot accept his doctrines. Sometimes I am stung with a desire to
avenge my wrongs; but I say to myself, "Will you, to gratify your
spleen, raise your hand against your mother the Church, who begot you at
the font and fed you with the word of God?" I cannot do it. Yet I
understand now how Arius, and Tertullian, and Wickliff were driven into
schism. The theologians say I am their enemy. Why? Because I bade monks
remember their vows; because I told parsons to leave their wranglings
and read the Bible; because I told popes and cardinals to look at the
Apostles, and make themselves more like to them. If this is to be their
enemy, then indeed I have injured them.'

This was almost the last. The stone, advancing years, and incessant toil
had worn him to a shred. The clouds grew blacker. News came from England
that his dear friends More and Fisher had died upon the scaffold. He had
long ceased to care for life; and death, almost as sudden as he had
longed for, gave him peace at last.

So ended Desiderius Erasmus, the world's idol for so many years; and
dying heaped with undeserved but too intelligible anathemas, seeing all
that he had laboured for swept away by the whirlwind.

Do not let me lead you to undervalue him. Without Erasmus, Luther would
have been impossible; and Erasmus really succeeded--so much of him as
deserved to succeed--in Luther's victory.

He was brilliantly gifted. His industry never tired. His intellect was
true to itself; and no worldly motives ever tempted him into
insincerity. He was even far braver than he professed to be. Had he been
brought to the trial, he would have borne it better than many a man who
boasted louder of his courage.

And yet, in his special scheme for remodelling the mind of Europe, he
failed hopelessly--almost absurdly. He believed, himself, that his work
was spoilt by the Reformation; but, in fact, under no conditions could
any more have come of it.

Literature and cultivation will feed life when life exists already; and
toleration and latitudinarianism are well enough when mind and
conscience are awake and energetic of themselves.

When there is no spiritual life at all; when men live only for
themselves and for sensual pleasure; when religion is superstition, and
conscience a name, and God an idol half feared and half despised--then,
for the restoration of the higher nature in man, qualities are needed
different in kind from any which Erasmus possessed.

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