Alexandre Dumas - "Chicot the Jester"

Jules Verne - "Le château des Carpathes"

St. George Stock - "Deductive Logic"

John Morley - "Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3)"

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.

What Is and What Might Be

E >> Edmond Holmes >> What Is and What Might Be




However rude and simple the histrionic efforts of the children may
be, they are doing two things for the actors. They are giving them a
living interest in the various subjects that are dramatised; and, by
teaching them to identify themselves, if only for a moment, with
other human beings, they are leading them into the path of tolerance,
of compassion, of charity, of sympathy,--the ever-widening path
which makes at last for Nirvanic oneness with the One Life.[17]


(3) _The Artistic Instinct_.

The desire to reproduce with pencil, paint, or clay the form and
colour of the outward world will, if duly cultivated, gradually
transform itself into the desire to feel, to understand, to
interpret, to express, not the form and colour only of the outward
world, but also that less palpable but more spiritual quality which
we call beauty. But in order that this transformation may take place,
the child must always endeavour to reproduce with due fidelity the
more palpable qualities of colour and form. In this endeavour he
must bring many faculties into play. He must observe closely and
attentively. He must reflect on what he observes. He must reflect on
what he himself is doing. He must compare his work with the original,
and try to discover how far he has succeeded, and where he has gone
astray. The more faithfully he tries to reproduce what he has seen,
the clearer and surer will be his insight into the less palpable
properties of things,--into those details, those aspects, those
qualities, which do not reveal themselves to the first careless
glance, but which will gradually reveal themselves to those who will
take the trouble to discover them. When he is asked to reproduce
things which are intrinsically beautiful--flowers, branches, buds,
shells, butterflies, and the like--he begins to realise that if his
work is to be successful, he must do justice to many impalpable,
though not imperceptible, details which go to the making up of
beauty. So the sense of beauty, the feeling for it, the desire to
bring it into his work, grows up in his heart; and a new kind of
fidelity--fidelity to _feeling_ rather than to _fact_ (if I may speak
for the moment in the delusive language of dualism)--begins to weave
itself into his artistic consciousness.

If there is any school in England in which fidelity to feeling has
evolved itself out of fidelity to fact, that school is in the village
of Utopia. Some ten or twelve years ago a decree went out from
Whitehall that Drawing was to be taught in all the elementary schools
in England. Egeria at once took the children into her confidence, and
said to them: "You have now got to learn to draw: you don't know how
to draw, and I don't know how to draw, but we must all set to work
and see what we can do." A few years later the school was visited by
the inspector to whose zeal as a prophet, and skill as an expositor
and teacher, the transformation in the teaching of drawing which is
gradually taking effect in all parts of the country, has been largely
due. Here is the report[18] that he wrote after his visit--

"In this school the teaching of Drawing reaches the highest
educational level I have hitherto met with in our elementary schools,
and the results are the genuine expression of the children's own
thoughts. Flat copies are not used, and the scholars evolve their
own technique, for the Head Teacher is not strong herself in this
respect. The development of thought carries with it the development
of skill, and this is clearly seen in the children's drawings, which
show good form and proportion, some knowledge of light and shade, a
delicate and refined perception of colour, and a wonderful power of
dealing with the difficulties of foreshortening. The central law is
self-effort,--confidence and self-reliance follow. The spontaneous
activities of the children are duly recognised, and the latter decide
what to draw, how to draw it, and the materials to be used. One
cannot remain long in the school without observing the absence of
that timidity, that haunting fear of making a mistake, which
paralyses the minds and bodies of so many of our children. Under the
influence of the Head Teacher the children become acute critics.
Her methods coincide so exactly with those which I have long been
advocating, that I give them in her own words--

"'I gave each child an ivy-leaf and said, "Now look well at it." We
talked about its peculiarities, looking at it all the time, and then
I told them to draw one, still looking back to the leaf from time to
time. Then I examined their drawings. A good many were, of course,
faulty. In those cases I did not say, "No, you are wrong; this is the
way," and go to the blackboard. I said, "In such and such a part is
yours the same as the leaf? What is different? How can you alter
it?" etc., etc. I make _them tell me_ their faults. There was no
blackboard demonstration.'

"From a careful examination of their work it is clear that the
children have not only been taught to draw, but that they love and
enjoy their drawing. Form and colour are not only seen, but
understood and felt. The children are impelled by an irresistible
desire to reach and express the truth, and are thus carried along
an ever-moving path of educative action."

I have already spoken of the love of visible beauty which is a
characteristic feature of the life of this school. It is in the
drawing lesson that this love of beauty has in the main evolved
itself. Other influences have no doubt been at work. Nature-study and
literature, for example, have, as taught in this school, done much to
foster the children's latent love of beauty; but had drawing never
been taught, the influence of those subjects would have been much
less effective than it has been. It is in the struggle to express
what he perceives that the Utopian child has gradually strengthened
and deepened his perceptive powers, till his sight has transformed
itself into insight, and form and colour have come to be interpreted
by him through the medium of the beauty which is behind them,--his
feeling of beauty having, little by little, been awakened and evolved
by his unceasing efforts to interpret the _vraie verite_ of form and
colour, which, as he now begins to learn, are beauty's outward self.


(4) _The Musical Instinct_.

In the development of the artistic sense the path of imitation is
followed until it leads at last to heights which it cannot scale. The
development of the musical sense takes from the first a widely
different path. Nature has a beautiful music of her own, but the
child seldom attempts to imitate this. Music belongs to the soul even
more than to the outward world. So at least one feels disposed to
think. But perhaps it is more correct to say that in the presence
of music the provisional distinction between inward and outward,
between the soul and the surrounding world, becomes wholly effaced.
Expression is always the counterpart of perception; and we may rest
assured that the deep, subtle, and elusive feelings to which music
gives utterance have reality for their counterpart. The musician does
not often reproduce in his compositions the audible sounds of the
outward world,--the voices of animals, the songs of birds, the rustle
of leaves, the murmur of the sea, the sighing of the breeze, the
thunder of the storm. What he does reproduce is the music that awakes
in his soul when the emotions which these sounds kindle begin to
struggle for expression,--the music that is behind all the audible
sounds, and perhaps also behind all the inaudible vibrations of
Nature,--the music that is in his heart because it is also at the
heart of Nature,--_the rhythm of the Universe_, as one may perhaps
call it for lack of a fitter phrase. It is the sense of this rhythm
which inspires the great Composer when he builds up his masterpieces.
It is the sense of this rhythm which inspires the child when, in the
joy of his heart, he breaks spontaneously into dance and song. To
bring the rhythm of the Universe into the daily life of the child,
to give free play to his instinctive sense of its all-pervading
presence, is one of the highest functions of the teacher. And the
more carefully the sense of rhythm is cultivated, the more does it
tend to spiritualise itself, and the more profound and more vital is
the life which it struggles to interpret and evolve. There is no
instinct which is so deeply seated as the musical. It is possible for
a child, it is possible for a whole class of children, to sing out of
the depths of the soul; and when this happens we may be sure that a
fountain of spiritual joy has been unsealed, and that a great and
sacred mystery has been unveiled. There is a school in one of the
poorest slums of a large town, in which, some two or three years ago,
the children were taught to sing, and the teachers to teach singing,
by an inspired "master" who believes that to lift the sluices of
spiritual feeling is to quicken into ever-increasing activity its
hidden springs; and neither the teachers nor the children have yet
forgotten their lesson. The children are poor, pale, thin, unkempt,
ill-clad, unlovely; but I am told that when they sing their faces are
transfigured, and they all become beautiful.

Egeria is an accomplished musician, and though Utopia belongs to one
of the unmusical counties of England, she has found it easy to awaken
the musical instinct in the hearts of its children. A few years ago
she introduced the old English Folk Songs and Morris Dances into the
school. The children took to them at once as ducklings take to the
water; and within a year they were able to give an admirably
successful performance of some two dozen songs and dances in the
village hall. Some of these had been rehearsed only once; but the
children, thanks to their having been systematically trained to
educate themselves, are so versatile and resourceful that every item
on their programme was a complete success. The Folk Songs and Morris
Dances are still the delight of the children. They are ever adding to
their repertory of songs; and when they go into the playground for
recreation, they at once form into small groups for Morris Dancing,
the older children taking the little ones in hand, and initiating
them into the pleasures of rhythmical movement.

There is another way in which Egeria brings music into the lives of
the children. In her own words, she "sets many of their lessons to
music." For example, when they are doing needlework or drawing or any
other quiet lesson, she plays high-class music to them, which forms a
background to their efforts and their thoughts, and which gradually
weaves itself, on the one hand into the outward and visible work that
they are doing, and on the other hand into the mysterious tissue of
their inward life.


(5) _The Inquisitive Instinct_.

As the inquisitive instinct makes the child an intolerable nuisance
to his ignorant and indolent elders, it is but natural that in the
unenlightened school, as in the unenlightened home, it should be
forcibly exterminated. It is through the agency of the formula "Don't
speak till you are spoken to," that its destruction is usually
effected. But under Egeria's aegis conversation in school hours is,
as we have seen, freely encouraged, and the child's right to ask
questions fully recognised; and one may therefore conjecture that
this proscribed and outlawed instinct will find a safe asylum in her
school. Whatever lesson may be in progress, the Utopian children are
allowed, and even expected, to seek for illumination whenever they
find themselves in the dark, to pause inquiringly at every obstacle
to their understanding what they have seen or heard or read.

The encouragement which is given in Utopia to the child who seeks to
gratify his desire for knowledge, is positive as well as negative.
When the obstacles which education usually places in his path have
been removed, it is found that the whole atmosphere of the school is
favourable to the growth of his inquisitive instinct. At every turn
he is called upon to plan and contrive, and is thus made to realise
his own limitations, and to try to escape from them. Whatever he may
have in hand,--be it the preparation for acting a new scene, or the
interpretation of a new Folk Song or Morris Dance, or the invention
of a new school game, or the thinking out some new way of treating a
"subject,"--he is sure to find that knowledge is needed if he is
to achieve success; and his desire for knowledge is therefore
continually stimulated by the demands that his own initiative and
activity are ever making upon him.

But it is in the "Nature lesson" that the inquisitive instinct finds
in Utopia its freest scope and its fullest opportunity. To one who
had persuaded himself of the innate stupidity of the average English
child, a Nature lesson in Utopia would come as a revelation. He would
learn for the first time that, far from being innately stupid, the
average English child has it in him to reach a very high level of
keenness, acuteness, and intellectual activity. Whenever a lesson is
given on a natural object, _e.g._ a flower or a leaf, every child has
a specimen and a lens. The object is then closely and carefully
observed, in the hope of discovering features in it which might
escape the unobservant. Whenever such features are discovered the
children try to account for them. In these attempts they display much
ingenuity and intelligence, and are led on by Egeria in the direction
of the true explanation of each phenomenon, and the relation of this
to what they know of the object as a whole, and of its meaning and
function. The eagerness of the children to volunteer explanations of
the facts that they observe is only equalled by the intelligence with
which they grasp the general bearing of the problems that confront
them, and the resourcefulness and quickness of wit with which they
make repeated attempts to solve them.

And these are not the only qualities to which the Nature lesson gives
free play. It is interesting to note that as on the one hand the
inquisitive instinct is obviously near of kin to the communicative,
so on the other hand it is ever tending to link itself to the
artistic. The closeness of observation which is the basis of success
in Nature-study, and by means of which the inquisitive instinct is
fed and strengthened, is also the basis of success in drawing; and
in each case it leads beyond itself into a region in which it has to
be supplemented by, and even transfigured into, imagination, the
faculty by means of which we observe what is at once impalpable and
real.[19] And in that region the distinction between truth and beauty
is ever tending to efface itself. The master sculptor is always an
accomplished anatomist; and the genuine naturalist is a lover and
admirer, as well as a student, of Nature. It has been well said that
"to see things in their beauty is to see them in their truth"; and it
is perhaps equally, though more remotely, true that to see things in
their truth is to see them in their beauty. That being so, we need
not wonder that among the Utopian children the love of what is
beautiful in Nature has grown continuously with the growth of their
interest in Nature-study, and that the inquisitive instinct is ever
Reinforcing and being reinforced by the artistic.


(6) _The Constructive Instinct_.

Active, intelligent, resourceful, self-helpful, the Utopian child
takes to handwork of various kinds as readily and almost as
spontaneously as the birds in spring-time take to the work of
nest-building. It must indeed be admitted that the systematic
instruction in Gardening, Cookery, and Woodwork which warrants the
payment of special grants for these "subjects" is not given. But
informal gardening, informal cookery, and informal woodwork are
vital features of the school life. Nor are the children's essays in
handwork limited to these subjects. Whatever implement, instrument,
or other contrivance may be needed in order to illustrate or
otherwise help forward the general work of the school will be made by
the children, so far as their technical ability and the resources of
the school permit. For example, they will make fences, seats, frames,
and sheds for their gardens, and "properties" and dresses for their
dramatic performances. They will illustrate their games and lessons
by means of simple modelling and paper-cutting. The older girls will
dress dolls for the little ones to their own fancy, using their own
discretion as regards material, style of dress, and method of
dress-making. And so on.

But ready as the Utopian children are to use their hands, and clever
as they are at using them, it is not through manual activity only
that the development of their constructive instinct is carried on.
One of the characteristic features of the school is the largeness
of the scale on which the constructive powers of the children are
encouraged to energise, and the frequency and variety of the demands
that are made upon them. The Utopian child is expected to educate
himself, not merely in the sense of doing by and for himself whatever
task may be set him, but also in the sense of devising new tasks for
himself, in thinking out new ways of treating the different subjects
that appear on the school time-table, in taking thought for the whole
scheme of his education. As the years go by, Egeria makes more and
greater demands on the initiative and the intelligence of the
children, her aim being apparently to transform the school by slow
degrees into a self-governing community which, under her presidency,
shall order its own life and work out its own salvation. This means,
as I have lately pointed out, that at every turn the Utopian child is
being called upon to plan and contrive; and this, again, means that
his constructive instinct, with his inquisitive instinct as its other
self, is being continually exercised on the widest possible field
and under the most stimulating of all influences. The result of
this is that reciprocal action is ever going on in his mind between
the faculties that acquire knowledge and the faculties that apply
it,--action which makes for the rapid and healthy growth of both sets
of faculties, and which is therefore ever tending to strengthen the
child's capacity for thinking and to raise the plane of its activity.

What is the culture of the child's expansive instincts likely to do
for him?

I will weave into my answer to this question my knowledge of what has
been done and is being done in Utopia.

It is through the medium of his own exertions that the evolution of
the child's instincts is carried on by Egeria. It may be possible to
lay veneers of information on the surface of a child's mind, but
it is not possible to lay on veneers of growth; and growth, not
information, is the end at which Egeria has always aimed. If a child
is to grow, he must exercise his own limbs, his own organs, his own
faculties. No one else can do this for him; and unless he does it
himself, it will never be done. The school life in Utopia is
therefore one of constant activity. The habit of doing things, of
doing things for himself, of doing things by himself, is gradually
built up in each child. There is no forced inertness in Utopia,
no slackness, no boredom, no yawning. And the activity which is
characteristic of the school is always the child's own activity. The
child himself is behind everything that he does. The child himself
is expressing himself in his every action. Mechanical activity, the
doing of things, not merely at the bidding of another, but also under
his minutely detailed direction, is as foreign to the genius of
the school as is the passivity of the helpless victims of the
unenlightened teacher's "chalk and talk."

The first consequence, then, of the training of the expansive
instincts which is given in Utopia is the building up in each scholar
of what I may call the habit of rational activity. In many schools
the energies of the child are systematically dammed back, till at
last the springs of his activity, finding that no demand is made upon
them, cease to flow. In Utopia the sluices, though always regulated,
are permanently lifted, and the energies of the child are ever
moving, with a strong and steady current, in whatever channel they
may have chanced to enter. So strong, indeed, and so steady is the
current that it maintains its movement long after the child has left
school. The employers of labour in the neighbourhood of Utopia will
tell you that there are no slackers or loafers in the yearly output
of the school. Egeria recently received a visit from one of her
ex-pupils, a girl of fourteen who is at home keeping house for her
father, and who said to her in the course of their conversation: "I
do just love washing days; I get up before six and start. Then, when
all the washing is done, I scrub everything bright in the copper
while I have the hot soapsuds." Accustomed as he (or she) is from his
(or her) earliest days to sincere and fearless self-expression, the
Utopian child is entirely incapable of indulging in cant; and the
genuineness of the sentiment which dictated those words is therefore
above suspicion. To work vigorously, to do well whatever he (or she)
has to do, is a real pleasure to the Utopian child. Indeed his whole
being is a living response to the familiar precept: "Whatsoever thy
hand findeth to do, do it with thy might."

And what he does with his might is always well worth doing. His
constant effort to express himself has, as its necessary counterpart,
a constant effort to find out what is worth expressing, to get to the
truth of things, to see things as they are. The consequent growth
of his perceptive powers may be looked at from two points of view.
On the one hand his growing capacity for getting on terms with
things--for feeling his way among them, for "getting, the hang" of
them, for making himself at home with them, for learning their ins
and outs, for understanding their ways and works--will give him the
power of putting forth an appropriate _sense_ in response to the
demands of each new environment, and, through the medium of this
sense, of converting information into knowledge. For this reason new
"subjects" have no terror for Egeria and her pupils. Though she has
never thought in subjects, she is ready to extend her curriculum in
any direction in which she thinks that her children are likely to
find interest or profit. The versatility, the mental agility, of the
children is as remarkable as their activity. The current of their
energy is ready to adapt itself to every modifying influence, to
every change of geological formation, that it may encounter in its
course, and to shape its channel or channels accordingly.

On the other hand, as healthy vigorous growth is always upward (and
downward) as well as outward, the lateral extension of the child's
perceptive powers must needs be balanced in Utopia by the gradual
elevation of his standpoint, with a corresponding widening of his
outlook, and the proportionate deepening of his insight. When the
school life of the child is one of continuous self-expression,
opportunities for "putting his soul" into what he says and does will
often present themselves to him; and if only a few of these are made
use of, his outlook on life will widen, and his imaginative sympathy
with life will deepen, to an extent which to one who had never
visited Utopia might well seem incredible. I have spoken of the
Utopian child's love of the beautiful. This is one aspect of the
spiritual growth that he is always making. Other aspects of it are
his strong sympathy with life in all its forms, and a certain large
and free way of looking at things, which, as far as my experience of
school children goes, is all his own.

There is yet another aspect of his spiritual growth which is perhaps
the most vital and the most typical of all. When we say that the
child is growing both laterally and vertically (like a shapely tree),
we mean that he is growing as a whole, as a living soul. Now the
growth of the soul as such must needs take the form of outgrowth, of
escape from "self." Growth is, in its essence, an emancipative
process; and though it sometimes intensifies selfishness and widens
the sphere of its activity, that is invariably due to its being
one-sided and therefore inharmonious and unhealthy. When the child
or the man is growing as a living whole, with a happy, harmonious,
many-sided growth, his growth is of necessity outgrowth, and he must
needs be escaping from the thraldom of his lower and lesser self.
This conclusion is no mere inference from accepted or postulated
premises. What I have seen in Utopia has forced it upon me. The
unselfishness, the natural, easy, spontaneous self-forgetfulness, of
the Utopian child, is the central feature of his moral life,--so
marked and withal so unique a feature that its presence proves to
demonstration, first, that growth of the right sort is necessarily
emancipative, and, next, that the growth made in Utopia is growth
of the right sort. I have already commented on the singular charm
of manner which distinguishes the children of Utopia. Their
self-forgetfulness, their entire lack of self-consciousness, is
one source of this charm. The tactfulness which their life of
self-expression, and therefore of trained perception, tends to
engender, is another. But the moral aspect of Utopianism is one of
such surpassing interest, and also of such profound significance
from the point of view of my fundamental "truism," that I must limit
myself for the moment to this passing reference to it, and reserve
it for fuller treatment in the remaining chapters.

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