United States Department of the Interior - "The Nation's River"

Vitruvius - "Ten Books on Architecture"

William Elmer Bachman - "The Delta of the Triple Elevens"

James Hay, Jr. - "The Winning Clue"

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.

The Napoleon of Notting Hill

G >> Gilbert K. Chesterton >> The Napoleon of Notting Hill




They were about to turn into the restaurant with a resigned air, when
their eyes were caught by something in the street. The weather, though
cold and blank, was now quite clear, and across the dull brown of the
wood pavement and between the dull grey terraces was moving something
not to be seen for miles round--not to be seen perhaps at that time in
England--a man dressed in bright colours. A small crowd hung on the
man's heels.

He was a tall stately man, clad in a military uniform of brilliant
green, splashed with great silver facings. From the shoulder swung a
short green furred cloak, somewhat like that of a Hussar, the lining
of which gleamed every now and then with a kind of tawny crimson. His
breast glittered with medals; round his neck was the red ribbon and
star of some foreign order; and a long straight sword, with a blazing
hilt, trailed and clattered along the pavement. At this time the
pacific and utilitarian development of Europe had relegated all such
customs to the Museums. The only remaining force, the small but
well-organised police, were attired in a sombre and hygienic manner.
But even those who remembered the last Life Guards and Lancers who
disappeared in 1912 must have known at a glance that this was not, and
never had been, an English uniform; and this conviction would have
been heightened by the yellow aquiline face, like Dante carved in
bronze, which rose, crowned with white hair, out of the green military
collar, a keen and distinguished, but not an English face.

The magnificence with which the green-clad gentleman walked down the
centre of the road would be something difficult to express in human
language. For it was an ingrained simplicity and arrogance, something
in the mere carriage of the head and body, which made ordinary moderns
in the street stare after him; but it had comparatively little to do
with actual conscious gestures or expression. In the matter of these
merely temporary movements, the man appeared to be rather worried and
inquisitive, but he was inquisitive with the inquisitiveness of a
despot and worried as with the responsibilities of a god. The men who
lounged and wondered behind him followed partly with an astonishment
at his brilliant uniform, that is to say, partly because of that
instinct which makes us all follow one who looks like a madman, but
far more because of that instinct which makes all men follow (and
worship) any one who chooses to behave like a king. He had to so
sublime an extent that great quality of royalty--an almost imbecile
unconsciousness of everybody, that people went after him as they do
after kings--to see what would be the first thing or person he would
take notice of. And all the time, as we have said, in spite of his
quiet splendour, there was an air about him as if he were looking for
somebody; an expression of inquiry.

Suddenly that expression of inquiry vanished, none could tell why, and
was replaced by an expression of contentment. Amid the rapt attention
of the mob of idlers, the magnificent green gentleman deflected
himself from his direct course down the centre of the road and walked
to one side of it. He came to a halt opposite to a large poster of
Colman's Mustard erected on a wooden hoarding. His spectators almost
held their breath.

He took from a small pocket in his uniform a little penknife; with
this he made a slash at the stretched paper. Completing the rest of
the operation with his fingers, he tore off a strip or rag of paper,
yellow in colour and wholly irregular in outline. Then for the first
time the great being addressed his adoring onlookers--

"Can any one," he said, with a pleasing foreign accent, "lend me a
pin?"

Mr. Lambert, who happened to be nearest, and who carried innumerable
pins for the purpose of attaching innumerable buttonholes, lent him
one, which was received with extravagant but dignified bows, and
hyperboles of thanks.

The gentleman in green, then, with every appearance of being
gratified, and even puffed up, pinned the piece of yellow paper to
the green silk and silver-lace adornments of his breast. Then he
turned his eyes round again, searching and unsatisfied.

"Anything else I can do, sir?" asked Lambert, with the absurd
politeness of the Englishman when once embarrassed.

"Red," said the stranger, vaguely, "red."

"I beg your pardon?"

"I beg yours also, Senor," said the stranger, bowing. "I was wondering
whether any of you had any red about you."

"Any red about us?--well really--no, I don't think I have--I used to
carry a red bandanna once, but--"

"Barker," asked Auberon Quin, suddenly, "where's your red cockatoo?
Where's your red cockatoo?"

"What do you mean?" asked Barker, desperately. "What cockatoo? You've
never seen me with any cockatoo!"

"I know," said Auberon, vaguely mollified. "Where's it been all the
time?"

Barker swung round, not without resentment.

"I am sorry, sir," he said, shortly but civilly, "none of us seem to
have anything red to lend you. But why, if one may ask--"

"I thank you, Senor, it is nothing. I can, since there is nothing
else, fulfil my own requirements."

And standing for a second of thought with the penknife in his hand, he
stabbed his left palm. The blood fell with so full a stream that it
struck the stones without dripping. The foreigner pulled out his
handkerchief and tore a piece from it with his teeth. The rag was
immediately soaked in scarlet.

"Since you are so generous, Senor," he said, "another pin, perhaps."

Lambert held one out, with eyes protruding like a frog's.

The red linen was pinned beside the yellow paper, and the foreigner
took off his hat.

"I have to thank you all, gentlemen," he said; and wrapping the
remainder of the handkerchief round his bleeding hand, he resumed his
walk with an overwhelming stateliness.

While all the rest paused, in some disorder, little Mr. Auberon Quin
ran after the stranger and stopped him, with hat in hand. Considerably
to everybody's astonishment, he addressed him in the purest Spanish--

"Senor," he said in that language, "pardon a hospitality, perhaps
indiscreet, towards one who appears to be a distinguished, but a
solitary guest in London. Will you do me and my friends, with whom
you have held some conversation, the honour of lunching with us at the
adjoining restaurant?"

The man in the green uniform had turned a fiery colour of pleasure at
the mere sound of his own language, and he accepted the invitation
with that profusion of bows which so often shows, in the case of the
Southern races, the falsehood of the notion that ceremony has nothing
to do with feeling.

"Senor," he said, "your language is my own; but all my love for my
people shall not lead me to deny to yours the possession of so
chivalrous an entertainer. Let me say that the tongue is Spanish but
the heart English." And he passed with the rest into Cicconani's.

"Now, perhaps," said Barker, over the fish and sherry, intensely
polite, but burning with curiosity, "perhaps it would be rude of me to
ask why you did that?"

"Did what, Senor?" asked the guest, who spoke English quite well,
though in a manner indefinably American.

"Well," said the Englishman, in some confusion, "I mean tore a strip
off a hoarding and ... er ... cut yourself ... and...."

"To tell you that, Senor," answered the other, with a certain sad
pride, "involves merely telling you who I am. I am Juan del Fuego,
President of Nicaragua."

The manner with which the President of Nicaragua leant back and drank
his sherry showed that to him this explanation covered all the facts
observed and a great deal more. Barker's brow, however, was still a
little clouded.

"And the yellow paper," he began, with anxious friendliness, "and the
red rag...."

"The yellow paper and the red rag," said Fuego, with indescribable
grandeur, "are the colours of Nicaragua."

"But Nicaragua ..." began Barker, with great hesitation, "Nicaragua is
no longer a...."

"Nicaragua has been conquered like Athens. Nicaragua has been annexed
like Jerusalem," cried the old man, with amazing fire. "The Yankee and
the German and the brute powers of modernity have trampled it with the
hoofs of oxen. But Nicaragua is not dead. Nicaragua is an idea."

Auberon Quin suggested timidly, "A brilliant idea."

"Yes," said the foreigner, snatching at the word. "You are right,
generous Englishman. An idea _brillant_, a burning thought. Senor,
you asked me why, in my desire to see the colours of my country, I
snatched at paper and blood. Can you not understand the ancient
sanctity of colours? The Church has her symbolic colours. And think of
what colours mean to us--think of the position of one like myself, who
can see nothing but those two colours, nothing but the red and the
yellow. To me all shapes are equal, all common and noble things are in
a democracy of combination. Wherever there is a field of marigolds and
the red cloak of an old woman, there is Nicaragua. Wherever there is a
field of poppies and a yellow patch of sand, there is Nicaragua.
Wherever there is a lemon and a red sunset, there is my country.
Wherever I see a red pillar-box and a yellow sunset, there my heart
beats. Blood and a splash of mustard can be my heraldry. If there be
yellow mud and red mud in the same ditch, it is better to me than
white stars."

"And if," said Quin, with equal enthusiasm, "there should happen to be
yellow wine and red wine at the same lunch, you could not confine
yourself to sherry. Let me order some Burgundy, and complete, as it
were, a sort of Nicaraguan heraldry in your inside."

Barker was fiddling with his knife, and was evidently making up his
mind to say something, with the intense nervousness of the amiable
Englishman.

"I am to understand, then," he said at last, with a cough, "that you,
ahem, were the President of Nicaragua when it made its--er--one must,
of course, agree--its quite heroic resistance to--er--"

The ex-President of Nicaragua waved his hand.

"You need not hesitate in speaking to me," he said. "I'm quite fully
aware that the whole tendency of the world of to-day is against
Nicaragua and against me. I shall not consider it any diminution of
your evident courtesy if you say what you think of the misfortunes
that have laid my republic in ruins."

Barker looked immeasurably relieved and gratified.

"You are most generous, President," he said, with some hesitation over
the title, "and I will take advantage of your generosity to express
the doubts which, I must confess, we moderns have about such things
as--er--the Nicaraguan independence."

"So your sympathies are," said Del Fuego, quite calmly, "with the big
nation which--"

"Pardon me, pardon me, President," said Barker, warmly; "my sympathies
are with no nation. You misunderstand, I think, the modern intellect.
We do not disapprove of the fire and extravagance of such
commonwealths as yours only to become more extravagant on a larger
scale. We do not condemn Nicaragua because we think Britain ought to
be more Nicaraguan. We do not discourage small nationalities because
we wish large nationalities to have all their smallness, all their
uniformity of outlook, all their exaggeration of spirit. If I differ
with the greatest respect from your Nicaraguan enthusiasm, it is not
because a nation or ten nations were against you; it is because
civilisation was against you. We moderns believe in a great
cosmopolitan civilisation, one which shall include all the talents of
all the absorbed peoples--"

"The Senor will forgive me," said the President. "May I ask the Senor
how, under ordinary circumstances, he catches a wild horse?"

"I never catch a wild horse," replied Barker, with dignity.

"Precisely," said the other; "and there ends your absorption of the
talents. That is what I complain of your cosmopolitanism. When you
say you want all peoples to unite, you really mean that you want all
peoples to unite to learn the tricks of your people. If the Bedouin
Arab does not know how to read, some English missionary or
schoolmaster must be sent to teach him to read, but no one ever says,
'This schoolmaster does not know how to ride on a camel; let us pay a
Bedouin to teach him.' You say your civilisation will include all
talents. Will it? Do you really mean to say that at the moment when
the Esquimaux has learnt to vote for a County Council, you will have
learnt to spear a walrus? I recur to the example I gave. In Nicaragua
we had a way of catching wild horses--by lassooing the fore
feet--which was supposed to be the best in South America. If you are
going to include all the talents, go and do it. If not, permit me to
say what I have always said, that something went from the world when
Nicaragua was civilised."

"Something, perhaps," replied Barker, "but that something a mere
barbarian dexterity. I do not know that I could chip flints as well as
a primeval man, but I know that civilisation can make these knives
which are better, and I trust to civilisation."

"You have good authority," answered the Nicaraguan. "Many clever men
like you have trusted to civilisation. Many clever Babylonians, many
clever Egyptians, many clever men at the end of Rome. Can you tell me,
in a world that is flagrant with the failures of civilisation, what
there is particularly immortal about yours?"

"I think you do not quite understand, President, what ours is,"
answered Barker. "You judge it rather as if England was still a poor
and pugnacious island; you have been long out of Europe. Many things
have happened."

"And what," asked the other, "would you call the summary of those
things?"

"The summary of those things," answered Barker, with great animation,
"is that we are rid of the superstitions, and in becoming so we have
not merely become rid of the superstitions which have been most
frequently and most enthusiastically so described. The superstition of
big nationalities is bad, but the superstition of small nationalities
is worse. The superstition of reverencing our own country is bad, but
the superstition of reverencing other people's countries is worse. It
is so everywhere, and in a hundred ways. The superstition of monarchy
is bad, and the superstition of aristocracy is bad, but the
superstition of democracy is the worst of all."

The old gentleman opened his eyes with some surprise.

"Are you, then," he said, "no longer a democracy in England?"

Barker laughed.

"The situation invites paradox," he said. "We are, in a sense, the
purest democracy. We have become a despotism. Have you not noticed how
continually in history democracy becomes despotism? People call it the
decay of democracy. It is simply its fulfilment. Why take the trouble
to number and register and enfranchise all the innumerable John
Robinsons, when you can take one John Robinson with the same intellect
or lack of intellect as all the rest, and have done with it? The old
idealistic republicans used to found democracy on the idea that all
men were equally intelligent. Believe me, the sane and enduring
democracy is founded on the fact that all men are equally idiotic. Why
should we not choose out of them one as much as another. All that we
want for Government is a man not criminal and insane, who can rapidly
look over some petitions and sign some proclamations. To think what
time was wasted in arguing about the House of Lords, Tories saying it
ought to be preserved because it was clever, and Radicals saying it
ought to be destroyed because it was stupid, and all the time no one
saw that it was right because it was stupid, because that chance mob
of ordinary men thrown there by accident of blood, were a great
democratic protest against the Lower House, against the eternal
insolence of the aristocracy of talents. We have established now in
England, the thing towards which all systems have dimly groped, the
dull popular despotism without illusions. We want one man at the head
of our State, not because he is brilliant or virtuous, but because he
is one man and not a chattering crowd. To avoid the possible chance of
hereditary diseases or such things, we have abandoned hereditary
monarchy. The King of England is chosen like a juryman upon an
official rotation list. Beyond that the whole system is quietly
despotic, and we have not found it raise a murmur."

"Do you really mean," asked the President, incredulously, "that you
choose any ordinary man that comes to hand and make him despot--that
you trust to the chance of some alphabetical list...."

"And why not?" cried Barker. "Did not half the historical nations
trust to the chance of the eldest sons of eldest sons, and did not
half of them get on tolerably well? To have a perfect system is
impossible; to have a system is indispensable. All hereditary
monarchies were a matter of luck: so are alphabetical monarchies. Can
you find a deep philosophical meaning in the difference between the
Stuarts and the Hanoverians? Believe me, I will undertake to find a
deep philosophical meaning in the contrast between the dark tragedy of
the A's, and the solid success of the B's."

"And you risk it?" asked the other. "Though the man may be a tyrant or
a cynic or a criminal."

"We risk it," answered Barker, with a perfect placidity. "Suppose he
is a tyrant--he is still a check on a hundred tyrants. Suppose he is a
cynic, it is to his interest to govern well. Suppose he is a
criminal--by removing poverty and substituting power, we put a check
on his criminality. In short, by substituting despotism we have put a
total check on one criminal and a partial check on all the rest."

The Nicaraguan old gentleman leaned over with a queer expression in
his eyes.

"My church, sir," he said, "has taught me to respect faith. I do not
wish to speak with any disrespect of yours, however fantastic. But do
you really mean that you will trust to the ordinary man, the man who
may happen to come next, as a good despot?"

"I do," said Barker, simply. "He may not be a good man. But he will be
a good despot. For when he comes to a mere business routine of
government he will endeavour to do ordinary justice. Do we not assume
the same thing in a jury?"

The old President smiled.

"I don't know," he said, "that I have any particular objection in
detail to your excellent scheme of Government. My only objection is a
quite personal one. It is, that if I were asked whether I would belong
to it, I should ask first of all, if I was not permitted, as an
alternative, to be a toad in a ditch. That is all. You cannot argue
with the choice of the soul."

"Of the soul," said Barker, knitting his brows, "I cannot pretend to
say anything, but speaking in the interests of the public--"

Mr. Auberon Quin rose suddenly to his feet.

"If you'll excuse me, gentlemen," he said, "I will step out for a
moment into the air."

"I'm so sorry, Auberon," said Lambert, good-naturedly; "do you feel
bad?"

"Not bad exactly," said Auberon, with self-restraint; "rather good, if
anything. Strangely and richly good. The fact is, I want to reflect a
little on those beautiful words that have just been uttered.
'Speaking,' yes, that was the phrase, 'speaking in the interests of
the public.' One cannot get the honey from such things without being
alone for a little."

"Is he really off his chump, do you think?" asked Lambert.

The old President looked after him with queerly vigilant eyes.

"He is a man, I think," he said, "who cares for nothing but a joke. He
is a dangerous man."

Lambert laughed in the act of lifting some maccaroni to his mouth.

"Dangerous!" he said. "You don't know little Quin, sir!"

"Every man is dangerous," said the old man without moving, "who cares
only for one thing. I was once dangerous myself."

And with a pleasant smile he finished his coffee and rose, bowing
profoundly, passed out into the fog, which had again grown dense and
sombre. Three days afterwards they heard that he had died quietly in
lodgings in Soho.

* * * * *

Drowned somewhere else in the dark sea of fog was a little figure
shaking and quaking, with what might at first sight have seemed terror
or ague: but which was really that strange malady, a lonely laughter.
He was repeating over and over to himself with a rich accent--"But
speaking in the interests of the public...."




CHAPTER III--_The Hill of Humour_


"In a little square garden of yellow roses, beside the sea," said
Auberon Quin, "there was a Nonconformist minister who had never been
to Wimbledon. His family did not understand his sorrow or the strange
look in his eyes. But one day they repented their neglect, for they
heard that a body had been found on the shore, battered, but wearing
patent leather boots. As it happened, it turned out not to be the
minister at all. But in the dead man's pocket there was a return
ticket to Maidstone."

There was a short pause as Quin and his friends Barker and Lambert
went swinging on through the slushy grass of Kensington Gardens. Then
Auberon resumed.

"That story," he said reverently, "is the test of humour."

They walked on further and faster, wading through higher grass as they
began to climb a slope.

"I perceive," continued Auberon, "that you have passed the test, and
consider the anecdote excruciatingly funny; since you say nothing.
Only coarse humour is received with pot-house applause. The great
anecdote is received in silence, like a benediction. You felt pretty
benedicted, didn't you, Barker?"

"I saw the point," said Barker, somewhat loftily.

"Do you know," said Quin, with a sort of idiot gaiety, "I have lots of
stories as good as that. Listen to this one."

And he slightly cleared his throat.

"Dr. Polycarp was, as you all know, an unusually sallow bimetallist.
'There,' people of wide experience would say, 'There goes the
sallowest bimetallist in Cheshire.' Once this was said so that he
overheard it: it was said by an actuary, under a sunset of mauve and
grey. Polycarp turned upon him. 'Sallow!' he cried fiercely, 'sallow!
_Quis tulerit Gracchos de seditione querentes._' It was said that no
actuary ever made game of Dr. Polycarp again."

Barker nodded with a simple sagacity. Lambert only grunted.

"Here is another," continued the insatiable Quin. "In a hollow of the
grey-green hills of rainy Ireland, lived an old, old woman, whose
uncle was always Cambridge at the Boat Race. But in her grey-green
hollows, she knew nothing of this: she didn't know that there was a
Boat Race. Also she did not know that she had an uncle. She had heard
of nobody at all, except of George the First, of whom she had heard (I
know not why), and in whose historical memory she put her simple
trust. And by and by in God's good time, it was discovered that this
uncle of hers was not really her uncle, and they came and told her so.
She smiled through her tears, and said only, 'Virtue is its own
reward.'"

Again there was a silence, and then Lambert said--

"It seems a bit mysterious."

"Mysterious!" cried the other. "The true humour is mysterious. Do you
not realise the chief incident of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries?"

"And what's that?" asked Lambert, shortly.

"It is very simple," replied the other. "Hitherto it was the ruin of a
joke that people did not see it. Now it is the sublime victory of a
joke that people do not see it. Humour, my friends, is the one
sanctity remaining to mankind. It is the one thing you are thoroughly
afraid of. Look at that tree."

His interlocutors looked vaguely towards a beech that leant out
towards them from the ridge of the hill.

"If," said Mr. Quin, "I were to say that you did not see the great
truths of science exhibited by that tree, though they stared any man
of intellect in the face, what would you think or say? You would
merely regard me as a pedant with some unimportant theory about
vegetable cells. If I were to say that you did not see in that tree
the vile mismanagement of local politics, you would dismiss me as a
Socialist crank with some particular fad about public parks. If I were
to say that you were guilty of the supreme blasphemy of looking at
that tree and not seeing in it a new religion, a special revelation of
God, you would simply say I was a mystic, and think no more about me.
But if"--and he lifted a pontifical hand--"if I say that you cannot
see the humour of that tree, and that I see the humour of it--my God!
you will roll about at my feet."

He paused a moment, and then resumed.

"Yes; a sense of humour, a weird and delicate sense of humour, is the
new religion of mankind! It is towards that men will strain themselves
with the asceticism of saints. Exercises, spiritual exercises, will be
set in it. It will be asked, 'Can you see the humour of this iron
railing?' or 'Can you see the humour of this field of corn? Can you
see the humour of the stars? Can you see the humour of the sunsets?'
How often I have laughed myself to sleep over a violet sunset."

"Quite so," said Mr. Barker, with an intelligent embarrassment.

"Let me tell you another story. How often it happens that the M.P.'s
for Essex are less punctual than one would suppose. The least punctual
Essex M.P., perhaps, was James Wilson, who said, in the very act of
plucking a poppy--"

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