Various - "Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859"

W. D. Howells - "The Story of a Play"

G. A. Henty - "With Moore At Corunna"

Northern Nut Growers Association - "Northern Nut Growers Report of the Proceedings at the Twenty First Annual Meeting"

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.

Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Volume 14

E >> Elbert Hubbard >> Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Volume 14




"It's the lad who wants you to give him lessons," answered the
attendant.

"Impossible! no lad could play like that--I can teach that player
nothing!"

Next the musician Paer was visited, and he passed the boy along to
Giretta, who gave him three lessons a week in harmony and counterpoint.
The boy had abrupt mannerisms and tricks of his own in bringing out
expressions, and these were such a puzzle to the teacher that he soon
refused to go on.

Niccolo possessed a sort of haughty self-confidence that aggravated the
master; he believed in himself and was fond of showing that he could
play in a way no one else could. Adolescence had turned his desire to
play into a fury of passion for his art: he practised on single passages
for ten or twelve hours a day, and would often sink in a swoon from
sheer exhaustion. This deep, torpor-like sleep saved him from complete
collapse, just as it saved Mendelssohn, and he would arise to go on with
his work.

Paganini's wisdom was shown at this early age in that he limited his
work to a few compositions, and these he made the most of, just as they
say Bossuet secured his reputation as the greatest preacher of his time
by a single sermon that he had polished to the point of perfection.

When fifteen years old Paganini contrived to escape from his father and
went to a musical festival at Lucca. He managed to get a hearing, was
engaged at once as a soloist, and soon after gave a concert on his own
account. In a month he had accumulated a thousand pounds in cash.

Very naturally, such a success turned the head of this lad who never
before had had the handling of money. He began to gamble, and became the
dupe of rogues--male and female--who plunged him into an abyss of wrong.
He even gambled away the "Stradivarius" that had been presented to him,
and when his money, watch and jewels were gone, his new-found friends of
course decamped, and this gave the young man time to ponder on the
vanities of life.

When he played again it was on a borrowed "Guarnerius," and after the
rich owner, himself a violinist, had heard him play, he said, "No
fingers but yours shall ever play that violin again!"

Paganini accepted the gift, and this was the violin he played for full
forty years, and which, on his death, was willed to his native city of
Genoa. There it can be seen in its sealed-up glass case.

Up to his thirtieth year Paganini continued his severe work of subduing
the violin. By that time he had sounded its possibilities, and
thereafter no one heard him play except in concert. It is told that one
man, anxious to know the secrets of Paganini's power, followed him from
city to city, watching him at his concerts, dogging him through the
streets, spying upon him at hotels. At one inn this man of curiosity had
the felicity to secure a room next to the one occupied by Paganini; and
one morning as he watched through the keyhole, he was rewarded by seeing
the master open the case where reposed the precious "Guarnerius."
Paganini lifted the instrument, held it under his chin, took up the bow
and made a few passes in the air--not a sound was heard. Then he kissed
the back of the violin, muttered a prayer, and locked the instrument in
its case.

At concert rehearsals he always played a mute instrument; and Harris,
his manager, records that for the many years he was with Paganini he
never heard him play a single note except before an audience.

I have a full-length daguerreotype of Paganini taken when he was forty
years of age. No one ever asked this man, "Kind sir, are you anybody in
particular?"

Paganini was tall and wofully slim. His hands and feet were large and
bony, his arms long, his form bowed and lacking in all that we call
symmetry. But the long face with its look of abject melancholy, the
curved nose, the thin lips and the sharp, protruding chin, made a
combination that Fate has never duplicated. You could easily believe
that this man knew all the secrets of the Nether World, and had tasted
the joys of Paradise as well. Women pitied and loved him, men feared
him, and none understood him. He lived in the midst of throngs and
multitudes--the loneliest man known in the history of art.

Paganini, when he had reached his height, played only his own music; he
played divinely and incomprehensibly; next to his passion for music was
his greed for gold. These three facts sum up all we really know about
the master--the rest fades off into mist--mystery, fable and legend. We
do know, however, that he composed several pieces of music so difficult
that he could not play them himself, and of course no one else can.
Imagination can always outrun performance. Paganini had no close
friends; no confidants: he never mingled in society, and he never
married.

At times he would disappear from the public gaze for several months,
and not even his business associates knew where he was. On one such
occasion a traveler discovered him in a monastic retreat in the Swiss
Mountains, wearing a horsehair robe and a rope girdle; others saw him
disguised as a mendicant; and still another tells of finding him working
as a day-laborer with obscure and ignorant peasants. Then there are
tales told of how he was taken captive by a titled lady of great wealth
and beauty, who carried him away to her bower, where he eschewed the
violin and tinkled only the guitar the livelong day.

Everywhere the report was current that Paganini had killed a man, and
been sentenced to prison for life. The story ran that in prison he found
an old violin, three strings of which were broken, and so he played on
one string, producing such ravishing music that the keepers feared he
was "possessed." They decided they must get rid of him, and so contrived
to have him thrown overboard from a galley; but he swam ashore, and
although he was everywhere known, no man dared place a hand on him.

A late writer in a London magazine, however, has given evidence of being
a psychologist and man of sense; he says, and produces proof, that after
the concert season was over Paganini withdrew to a monastery in the
mountains of Switzerland, and there the monks who loved him well,
guarded his retreat. There he found the rest for which his soul craved,
and there he practised on his violin hour after hour, day after day.
All this is better understood when we remember that after each retreat,
Paganini appeared with brand-new effects which electrified his
hearers--"effects taught him by the devil."

Constant appearing before vast multitudes and ceaseless travel create a
depletion that demands rest. Paganini held the balance true by fleeing
to the mountains; there he worked and prayed. That Paganini had a soft
heart, in spite of the silent, cold and melancholy mood that usually
possessed him, is shown in his treatment of his father and mother, who
lived to know the greatness of their son. He wrote his mother kind and
affectionate letters, some of which we have, and provided lavishly for
every want of both his parents. At times he gave concerts for charity,
and on these occasions vast sums were realized.

Paganini died in Eighteen Hundred Forty, aged fifty-six years. His will
provided for legacies to various men and women who had befriended him,
and he also gave to others with whom he had quarreled, thus proving he
was not all clay.

The bulk of his fortune, equal to half a million dollars, was bequeathed
to his son, Baron Achille Paganini. And as if mystery should still
enshroud his memory and this, true to his nature, should be carried out
in his last will, there are those who maintain that Achille Paganini was
not his son at all--only a waif he had adopted. Yet Achille always
stoutly maintained the distinction--but what boots it, since he could
not play his father's violin?

Yet this we know--Paganini, the man of mystery and moods, once lived and
produced music that, Orpheus-like, transfixed the world. We are better
for his having been and this world is a nobler place in that he lived
and played, for listen closely and you can hear, even now, the sweet,
sad echoes of those vibrant strings, touched by the hand of him who
loved them well.

And when we remember the prodigious amount of practise that Paganini
schooled himself to in youth; and join this to the recently discovered
record of his long monastic retreats, when for months he worked and
played and prayed, we can guess the secret of his power. If you wish me
to present you a recipe for doing a deathless performance, I would give
you this: Work, travel, solitude, prayer, and yet again--work.




[Illustration: FREDERIC CHOPIN]

FREDERIC CHOPIN


Nature does not design like art, however realistic she may be. She
has caprices, inconsequences, probably not real, but very
mysterious. Art only rectifies these inconsequences, because it is
too limited to reproduce them. Chopin was a resume of these
inconsequences which God alone can allow Himself to create, and
which have their particular logic. He was modest on principle,
gentle by habit, but he was imperious by instinct and full of a
legitimate pride which was unconscious of itself. Hence arose
sufferings which he did not reason and which did not fix themselves
on a determined object.

--_George Sand in "The Story of My Life"_


FREDERIC CHOPIN

Maybe I am all wrong about it, yet I can not help believing that the
spirit of man will live again somewhere in a better world than ours.
Fenelon says, "Justice demands another life in order to make good the
inequalities of this." Astronomers prophesy the existence of stars long
before they can see them. They know where they ought to be, and training
their telescopes in that direction they wait, knowing they will find.

Materially, no one can imagine anything more beautiful than this earth,
for the simple reason that we can not imagine anything we have not seen;
we may make new combinations, but the whole is all made up of parts of
things with which we are familiar. This great green earth out of which
we have sprung, of which we are a part, that supports our bodies, and to
which our bodies must return to repay the loan, is very, very beautiful.

But the spirit of man is not fully at home here; as we grow in soul and
intellect, we hear, and hear again, a voice which says, "Arise and get
thee hence, for this is not thy rest." And the greater and nobler and
more sublime the spirit, the more constant the discontent. Discontent
may come from various causes, so it will not do to assume that the
discontented are always the pure in heart, but it is a fact that the
wise and excellent have all known the meaning of world-weariness. The
more you study and appreciate this life, the more sure you are that this
is not all. You pillow your head upon Mother Earth, listen to her
heart-throb, and even as your spirit is filled with the love of her,
your gladness is half-pain and there comes to you a joy that hurts.

To look upon the most exalted forms of beauty, such as a sunset at sea,
the coming of a storm on the prairie, the shadowy silence of the desert,
or the sublime majesty of the mountains, begets a sense of sadness, an
increasing loneliness.

It is not enough to say that man encroaches on man so that we are really
deprived of our freedom, that civilization is caused by a bacillus, and
that from a natural condition we have gotten into a hurly-burly where
rivalry is rife--all this may be true, but beyond and outside of all
this there is no physical environment in way of plenty which earth can
supply, that will give the tired soul peace. They are the happiest who
have the least; and the fable of the stricken king and the shirtless
beggar contains the germ of truth. The wise hold all earthly ties very
lightly--they are stripping for eternity.

World-weariness is only a desire for a better spiritual condition. There
is more to be written on this subject of world-pain--to exhaust the
theme would require a book. And certain it is that I have no wish to
say the final word on any topic. The gentle reader has certain rights,
and among these is the privilege of summing up the case. But the fact
holds that world-pain is a form of desire. All desires are just, proper
and right; and their gratification is the means by which Nature supplies
us that which we need. Desire not only causes us to seek that which we
need, but is a form of attraction by which the good is brought to us,
just as the ameba creates a swirl in the waters that brings its food
within reach. Every desire in Nature has a fixed, definite purpose in
the Divine Economy, and every desire has its proper gratification. If we
desire the friendship of a certain person, it is because that person has
certain soul-qualities that we do not possess, and which complement our
own. Through desire do we come into possession of our own; by submitting
to its beckonings we add cubits to our stature; and we also give out to
others our own attributes, without becoming poorer, for soul is not
limited.

All Nature is a symbol of spirit, so I believe that somewhere there must
be a proper gratification for this mysterious nostalgia of the soul. The
Eternal Unities require a condition where men and women will live to
love, and not to sorrow; where the tyranny of things hated shall not
ever prevail, nor that for which the heart yearns turn to ashes at our
touch.

* * * * *

"I believe Stevie is not quite at home here--he'll not remain so very
long," said a woman to me in Eighteen Hundred Ninety-five. Five years
have gone by, and recently the cable flashed the news that Stephen Crane
was dead.

Dead at twenty-nine, with ten books to his credit, two of them good,
which is two good books more than most of us scribblers will ever write.
Yes, Stephen Crane wrote two things that are immortal. "The Red Badge of
Courage" is the strongest, most vivid work of imagination ever fished
from an ink-pot by an American.

"Men who write from the imagination are helpless when in presence of the
fact," said James Russell Lowell. In answer to which I'll point you "The
Open Boat," the sternest, creepiest bit of realism ever penned, and
Stevie was in the boat.

American critics honored Stephen Crane with more ridicule, abuse and
unkind comment than was bestowed on any other writer of his time.
Possibly the vagueness, and the loose, unsleeked quality of his work
invited the gibes, jeers, and the loud laughter that tokens the vacant
mind; yet as half-apology for the critics we might say that scathing
criticism never killed good work; and this is true, but it sometimes has
killed the man.

Stephen Crane never answered back, nor made explanation, but that he was
stung by the continued efforts of the press to laugh him down, I am very
sure.

The lack of appreciation at home caused him to shake the dust of
America from his feet and take up his abode across the sea, where his
genius was being recognized, and where strong men stretched out sinewy
hands of welcome, and words of appreciation were heard, instead of
silly, insulting parody. In passing, it is well to note that the five
strongest writers of America had their passports to greatness viseed in
England before they were granted recognition at home. I refer to Walt
Whitman, Thoreau, Emerson, Poe and Stephen Crane.

Stevie did not know he cared for approbation, but his constant refusal
to read what the newspapers said about him was proof that he did. He
boycotted the tribe of Romeike, because he knew that nine clippings out
of every ten would be unkind, and his sensitive soul shrank from the
pin-pricks.

Contemporary estimates are usually wrong, and Crane is only another of
the long list of men of genius to whom Fame brings a wreath and finds
her poet dead.

Stephen Crane was a reincarnation of Frederic Chopin. Both were small in
stature, slight, fair-haired, and of that sensitive, acute, receptive
temperament--capable of highest joy and keyed for exquisite pain.
Haunted with the prophetic vision of quick-coming death, and with the
hectic desire to get their work done, they often toiled the night away
and were surprised by the rays of the rising sun. Both were shrinking
yet proud, shy but bold, with a tenderness and a feminine longing for
love that earth could not requite. At times mad gaiety, that ill-masked
a breaking heart, took the reins, and the spirits of children just out
of school seemed to hold the road. At other times--and this was the
prevailing mood--the manner was one of placid, patient, calm and smooth,
unruffled hope; but back and behind all was a dynamo of energy, a
brooding melancholy of unrest, and the crouching world-sorrow that would
not down.

Chopin reached sublimity through sweet sounds; Crane attained the same
heights through the sense of sight and words that symboled color, shapes
and scenes. In each the distinguishing feature is the intense
imagination and active sympathy. Knowledge consists in a sense of
values--of distinguishing this from that, for truth lies in the mass.
The delicate nuances of Chopin's music have never been equaled by
another composer; every note is cryptic, every sound a symbol. And yet
it is dance-music, too, but still it tells its story of baffled hope and
stifled desire--the tragedy of Poland in sweet sounds.

Stephen Crane was an artist in his ability to convey the feeling by just
the right word, or a word misplaced, like a lady's dress in disarray, or
a hat askew. This daring quality marks everything he wrote. The
recognition that language is fluid, and at best only an expedient,
flavors all his work. He makes no fetish of a grammar--if grammar gets
in the way, so much the worse for the grammar. All is packed with color,
and charged with feeling, yet the work is usually quiet in quality and
modest in manner.

Art is born of heart, not head; and so it seems to me that the work of
these men whose names I have somewhat arbitrarily linked, will live.
Each sowed in sorrow and reaped in grief. They were tender, kind,
gentle, with a capacity for love that passes the love of woman. They
were each indifferent to the proprieties, very much as children are.
They lived in cloister-like retirement, hidden from the public gaze, or
wandered unnoticed and unknown. They founded no schools, delivered no
public addresses, and in their own day made small impress on the times.
Both were sublimely indifferent to what had been said and done--the term
precedent not being found within the covers of their bright lexicon of
words. In the nature of each was a goodly trace of peroxide of iron that
often manifested itself in the man's work.

The faults in each spring from an intense personality, uncolored by the
surroundings, and such faults in such men are virtues.

They belong to that elect few who have built for the centuries. The
influence of Chopin, beyond that of other composers, is alive today, and
moves unconsciously, but profoundly, every music-maker; the seemingly
careless style of Crane is really lapidaric, and is helping to file the
fetters from every writer who has ideas plus, and thoughts that burn.

Mother Nature in giving out energy gives each man about an equal
portion. But that ability to throw the weight with the blow, to
concentrate the soul in a sonnet, to focus force in a single effort, is
the possession of God's Chosen Few. Chopin put his affection, his
patriotism, his wrath, his hope, and his heroism into his music--as if
the song of all the forest birds could be secured, sealed and saved for
us!

* * * * *

The father of Chopin was a Frenchman who went up to Poland seeking gain
and adventure. He became a soldier under Kosciusko and arose to rank of
Captain. He found such favor with the nobility by his gracious ways that
he became a teacher of French in the family of Count Frederic Skarbek.
In the family group was a fair young dependent of nervous
temperament--slight, active, gentle and intelligent. She was descendent
from a line of aristocrats, but in a country where revolutions have been
known to begin and end before breakfast, titles stand for little.

Nicholas Chopin, ex-soldier, teacher of French and Deportment, married
this fine young girl, and they lived in one of Count Skarbek's
straw-thatched cottages at the little village of Zelazowa-Wola,
twenty-nine miles from Warsaw. Here it was that Frederic Chopin was
born, in Eighteen Hundred Nine--that memorable year when Destiny sent a
flight of great souls to the planet Earth.

The country was bleak and battle-scarred; it had been drained of its men
and treasure, and served as a dueling-ground and the place of skulls for
kings and such riffraff who have polluted this fair world with their
boastings of a divine power.

The struggle of Poland to free herself from the grip of the imperial
succubi has generated an atmosphere of ultramarine, so we view the
little land of patriots (and fanatics) through a mist of melancholy.
The history of Poland is written in blood and tears.

Go ask John Sobieski, who saw his father hanged by order of Ferdinand
Maximilian, and child though he was, realized that banishment was the
fate of himself and mother; and then ten years after, himself, stood
death-guard over this same Maximilian in Mexico, and told that tyrant
the story of his life, and shook hands with him, calling it quits, ere
the bandage was tied over the eyes of the ex-dictator and the sunlight
shut out forever.

Go ask John Sobieski!

The woes of Poland have produced strange men. Under such rule as she has
known relentless hate springs up in otherwise gracious hearts from the
scattered dragons' teeth; and in other natures, where there is not quite
so much of the motive temperament, a deep strain of sorrow and religious
melancholy finds expression. The exquisite sensibility, delicate
insight, proud reserve and brooding world-sorrow of Frederic Chopin were
the inheritance of mother to son. This mother's mind was saturated with
the wrongs her people had endured: she herself had suffered every
contumely, for where chance had caused fact to falter, imagination had
filled the void.

It is easy to say that Chopin's was an abnormal nature, and of course it
was, but when disease divides this world from another only by the
thinnest veil, the mind has been known to see things with a clearness
and vividness never before attained. With Chopin the strands of life
were often taut to the breaking-point, but ere they snapped, their
vibration gave forth to us some exquisite harmonies.

Curiously enough, this power to see and do is often the possession of
dying men. The life flares up in a flame before it goes out forever. The
passion of the consumptive Camille, as portrayed by Dumas, is
typical--no healthy woman ever loved with that same intense, eager and
almost vindictive desire. It was a race with Death.

Perfect health brings unconsciousness of body, and disease that almost
relieves the spirit of this weight of flesh produces the same results.
Again we have the Law of Antithesis.

That such a youth as Frederic Chopin should seek in music a surcease
from his world-sorrow is very natural. A stricken people turns to music;
it forms a necessary part of all religious observance, and the dirge of
mourners, the wail of the "keener," and the songs of the banshee evolve
naturally into being wherever the heart is sore oppressed. It was the
slave-songs that made slavery bearable; and in the long ago, exiles in
Babylon found a solemn joy by singing the songs of Zion. Chopin drank in
the songs of Poland with his mother's milk, and while yet a child began
to give them voice in his own way.

In the meantime his father's fortunes had mended a bit, and the family
had moved to Warsaw, where Nicholas Chopin was Professor of Languages at
the Lyceum. The title of the office fills the mouth in a very satisfying
way, but the emoluments attached hardly afforded such a gratification.

In Warsaw there was much misery, for the plunderer had worked
conscription and seizure to its furthest limit. Want and destitution
were on every hand, but still this brave people maintained their
University and clung to its traditions. The family of the Professor of
Languages consisted of himself, wife, three daughters and the son
Frederic. Their income for several years was not over fifteen dollars a
month, but still they managed to maintain an appearance of decency, and
by the help of the public library, the free museum and the open-air
concerts, they kept abreast of the times in literature, art and music.

There was absolute economy required, every particle of food was saved,
and when cast-off dresses were sent from the home of the Count it was a
godsend for the mother and girls, who measured and patched and pieced,
making garments for themselves, and for Frederic as well; so while their
raiment was not gaudy nor expressed in fancy, it served.

Chopin once said to George Sand, "I never can think of my mother without
her knitting-needles!" And George Sand has recorded, "Frederic never had
but one passion and that was his mother." Into all of her knitting this
mother's flying needles worked much love. The entire household was one
of mutual service, and gentle, trusting affection. The weekly letters of
Chopin to his mother from Paris, and the cold sweat on his forehead at
the thought of his parents knowing of his relationship with George Sand,
are credit-marks to his character. There is a sweet recompense in mutual
deprivation where trials and difficulties only serve to cement the
affections; and who shall say how much the wondrous blending of strength
and delicacy in the music of Chopin is due to the memory of those early
days of toil and trial, of strength and forbearance, of hope and love?

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