A. C. Laut - "Lords of the North"

P. G. Wodehouse - "Death At The Excelsior"

John Burroughs - "Birds and Poets"

Angela Brazil - "For the Sake of the School"

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 Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper

M >> Martin Farquhar Tupper >> The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper




Now, as editor, I have had to do--what seems, by the way, to be regarded
by collective wisdom as the best thing possible--nothing: my author
would not suffer the change of a syllable, for all his seeming
carelessness about the THING, as he called it; so, I had no
more for my part than humbly to act the Helot, and try to set decently
upon the public tables a genuine mess of Spartan porridge.

M. F. T.

_Albury, Guildford_.




AN AUTHOR'S MIND:

THE

BOOK OF TITLE-PAGES.




A RAMBLE.


In these days of universal knowledge, schoolmaster and scholars all
abroad together, quotation is voted pedantry, and to interpret is
accounted an impertinence; yet will I boldly proclaim, as a mere fact,
clear to the perceptions of all it may concern, "This book deserves
richly of the Sosii." And that for the best of reasons: it is not only a
book, but a book full of books; not merely a new book, but a
little-library of new books; thirty books in one, a very harvest of
epitomized authorship, the cream of a whole fairy dairy of quiescent
post-octavos. It is not--O, mark ye this, my Sosii, (and by the way,
gentle ladies, these were worshipful booksellers of old, the Murrays and
the Bentleys of imperial Rome,)--it is not the dull concreted elongation
of one isolated hackneyed idea--supposing in every work there _be one_,
a charitable hypothesis--wire-drawn, and coaxed, and hammered through
three regulation volumes; but the scarcely-more-than-hinted abstractions
of some forty thousand flitting notions--hasty, yet meditative Hamlets;
none of those lengthy, drawling emblems of Laertes--driven in flocks to
the net of the fowler, and penned with difficult compression within
these modest limits. So "goe forth, littel boke," and make thyself a
friend among those good husbandmen, who tend the trees of knowledge, and
bring their fruit to the world's market.

Now, reader, one little preliminary parley with you about myself: here
beginneth the trouble of authorship, but it is a trouble causing ease;
ease from thoughts--thoughts--thoughts, which never cease to make one's
head ache till they are fixed on paper; ease from dreams by night and
reveries by day, (thronging up in crowds behind, like Deucalion's
children, or a serried host in front, like Jason's instant army,)
harassing the brain, and struggling for birth, a separate existence, a
definite life; ease, in a cessation of that continuous internal hum of
aerial forget-me-nots, clamouring to be recorded. O, happy unimaginable
vacancy of mind, to whistle as you walk for want of thought! O, mental
holiday, now as impossible to me, as to take a true school-boy's
interest in rounders and prisoner's base! An author's mind--and remember
always, friend, I write in character, so judge not as egotistic vanity
merely the well playing of my _role_--such a mind is not a sheet of
smooth wax, but a magic stone indented with fluttering inscriptions; no
empty tenement, but a barn stored to bursting: it is a painful pressure,
constraining to write for comfort's sake; an appetite craving to be
satisfied, as well as a power to be exerted; an impetus that longs to
get away, rather than a dormant dynamic: thrice have I (let me confess
it) poured forth the alleviating volume as an author, a real
author--real, because for very peace of mind, involuntarily; but still
the vessel fills; still the indigenous crop springs up, choking a better
harvest, seeds of foreign growth; still those Lernaean necks sprout
again, claiming with many mouths to explain, amuse, suggest, and
controvert--to publish invention, and proscribe error. Truly, it were
enviable to be less apprehensive, less retentive; to be fitted with a
colander-mind, like that penal cask which forty-nine Danaides might not
keep from leaking; to be, sometimes at least, suffered for a holiday to
ramble brainless in the paradise of fools. Memory, imagination, zeal,
perceptions of men and things, equally with rank and riches, have often
cost their full price, as many mad have known; they take too much out of
a man--fret, wear, worry him; to be irritable, is the conditional tax
laid of old upon an author's intellect; the crowd of internal imagery
makes him hasty, quick, nervous as a haunted hunted man: minds of
coarser web heed not how small a thorn rends one of so delicate a
texture; they cannot estimate the wish that a duller sword were in a
tougher scabbard; the river, not content with channel and restraining
banks, overflows perpetually; the extortionate exacting armies of the
Ideal and the Causal persecute MY spirit, and I would make a
patriot stand at once to vanquish the invaders of my peace: I write
these things only to be quit of them, and not to let the crowd increase;
I have conceived a plan to destroy them all, as Jehu and Elijah with the
priests of Baal; I feel Malthusian among my mental nurselings; a dire
resolve has filled me to effect a premature destruction of the literary
populace superfoetating in my brain--plays, novels, essays, tales,
homilies, and rhythmicals; for ethics and poetics, politics and
rhetorics, will I display no more mercy than sundry commentators of
maltreated Aristotle: I will exhibit them in their state chaotic; I will
addle the eggs, and the chicken shall not chirp; I will reveal, and
secrets shall not waste me; I will write, and thoughts shall not batten
on me.

The world is too full of books, and I yearn not causelessly to add more
than this involuntary unit: bottles, bottles--invariable bottles--was
the one idea of a most clever Head at Nieder-Selters; books,
books--accumulating books--press upon my conscience in this literary
London: despairing auctioneers hate the sound, ruined publishers dread
it, surfeited readers grumble at it, and the very cheese-monger begins
to be an epicure as to which grand work is next to be demolished.
Friendships and loves tremble at the daily recurrence of "Have you read
this?" and "Mind you buy that;" wise men shun a blue-belle, sure that
she will recommend a book; and the yet wiser treat themselves to
solitary confinement, that they may not have to meet the last new batch
of authors, and be obliged to purchase, if not to peruse, their
never-ending books. I fear to increase the plague, to be convicted an
abettor of great evils, though by the measure of a little one. I am
infected, and I know it: but for science-sake I break the quarantine,
and in my magnanimity would be victimized unknown, consigning to a
speedy grave this useless offspring, together with its too productive
parent, and saving of a race so hopeless little else than their
predetermined names--in fact, their title-pages.

But is that indeed little? Speak, authors with piles of ready-written
copy, is not the theme (so often carried out beyond, or beside, or even
against its original purpose) less perplexing than the after-thought
thesis? Bear witness, readers, bit by a mysterious advertisement in the
'_Morning Post_,' are names, indeed, not matters of much weight? Press
forward, Sosii aforesaid, and answer me truly, is not a title-page the
better part of many books? Cheap promises of stale pleasure, false hopes
of dull interest, imprimaturs of deceived fancy, lying visions of the
future unfulfilled, title-pages still do good service to the cause
of--bookselling.

And, to commence, let me elucidate mine own--I mean the first, the head
and front of this offending phalanx--mine own, _par excellence_, '_An
Authors Mind_:' such in sooth it shall be found, for richer or poorer,
for better or for worse; not of selfish, but of common application; not
so much individually of mine own, as generically of authors; a medley
of crudities; an undigested mass, as any in the maw of Polypheme; a
fermenting hotchpotch of half-formed things, illustrative, among other
matters, of the Lucretian theory, those close-cohering atoms; a farrago
of thoughts, and systems of thoughts, in most admired disorder, which
would symbolize the Copernican astronomy, with its necessary clash of
whirling orbs, about as well as the intangible chaos of Berkeleyan
metaphysics.

So much then on the moment for the monosyllable "Mind;"--whereof
followeth, indeed, all the more hereafter; but--"An author's?"--what
author's? You would see my patent of such rank, my commission to wear
such honourable uniform. Pr'ythee be content with simple assurance that
it is so; consider the charm of unsatisfied curiosity, and pry not; let
me sit unseen, a spectator; for this once I would go _in domino_.
Heretofore, "credit me, fair Discretion, your Affability" hath achieved
glory, and might Solomonize on its vanity at least as well as poor
discomfited, discovered Sir Piercie Shafton: heretofore, I have stood
forth in good causes, with helm unbarred, and due proclamation of name,
style, and title, an avowed author; and might sermonize thus upon
success, that a little censure loseth more friends than much praise
winneth enemies. So now, with visor down, and a white shield, as a young
knight-candidate unknown, it pleases my leisure to take my pastime in
the tourney: and so long as in truthful prowess I bear me gallantly and
gently, who is he that hath a right to unlatch my helmet, or where is
the herald that may challenge my rank? Nevertheless, inquisitive,
consider the mysteries that lie in the Turkish-looking _sobriquet_ of
"Mufti;" its vowels and its consonants are full of strict intention I
never saw cause why the most charming of essayists hid himself in
"Elia," but he may for all that have had pregnant reasons; even so, (but
that slender wit could read my riddle,) you shall perhaps find fault
with my Mussulman agnomen; still you and I equally participate in this
shallow secret, and within so brief a word is concealed the key to
unlock the casket that tempts your curiosity: however, the less said of
so diaphanous a mystery, the better.

And let me remark this of the mode anonymous; a mode, indeed, to
purposes of shame, and slander, and falsity of all kinds too often
prostituted for the present, bear with it; sometimes it is well to go
disguised, and the voice of one unseen lacks not eager listeners; we
address your judgment, unbiased by the prejudice or sanction of a name:
we put forth, lightly and negligently, those lesser matters which
opportunity hath not yet matured; we escape the nervous pains, the
literary perils of the hardier acknowledged. Only of this one thing be
sure; we--(no, I; why should unregal, unhierarchal I affect
pluralities?)--I hope to keep inviolate, as much when masked as when
avowed, the laws of truth, charity, sincerity, and honour; and,
although, among my many booklets, the grave and the gay will be found in
near approximation, I trust--will it offend any to tell them that I
pray?--to do no ill service at any time to the cause of that true
religion which resents not the neighbourhood of innocent cheerfulness. I
show you, friend, my honest mind.

I by itself, I; odious mono-literal; thinnest, feeblest, most
insignificant of letters, I dread your egotistic influence as my bane;
they will not suffer you, nor bear with a book so speckled with your
presence. Still, world, hear me; mercifully spare a poor grammarian the
penance of perpetual third persons; let an individual tender conscience
escape censure for using the true singular in preference to that
imposing lie, the plural. Suffer a humble unit to speak of himself as I,
and, once for all, let me permissively disclaim intentional self-conceit
in the needful usage of isolated I-ship.

These few preliminaries being settled, though I fear little to the
satisfaction of either party concerned, let us proceed--further to
preliminarize; for you will find, even to the end, as you may have found
out already from the beginning, that your white knight is mounted rather
on an ambling preambling palfrey, than on any determinate charger;
curveting and prancing, and rambling and scrambling at his own unmanaged
will: scorning the bit and bridle, too hot to bear the spur, careless of
listing laws, and wishing rather playfully to show his paces, than to
tilt against a foe.

An author's mind, _qua_ author, is essentially a gossip; an oral,
ocular, imaginative, common-place book: a _pot pourri_ mixed from the
_hortus siccus_ of education, and the greener garden of internal thought
that springs in fresh verdure about the heart's own fountain; a compound
of many metals flowing from the mental crucible as one--perchance a base
alloy, perchance new, and precious, and beautiful as the fine brass of
Corinth; an accidental meeting in the same small chamber of many
spiritual essences that combine, as by magnetism into some strange and
novel substance; a mixture of appropriations, made lawfully a man's own
by labour spent upon the raw material; corn-clad Egypt rescued from a
burnt Africa by the richness of a swelling Nile--the black forest of
pines changed into a laughing vineyard by skill, enterprise, and
culture--the mechanism of Frankenstein's man of clay, energized at
length by the spark Promethean.

And now, reader, do you begin to comprehend me, and my title? '_An
Author's Mind_' is first in the field, and, as with root and fruit, must
take precedence of its booklets; bear then, if you will, with this
desultory anatomization of itself yet a little longer, and then in good
time and moderate space you will come to the rudiments--bones, so to
speak--of its many members, the frame-work on which its nerves and
muscles hang, the names of its unborn children, the title-pages of its
own unprinted books.

Philosophers and fools, separately or together, as the case may be--for
folly and philosophy not seldom form one Janus-head, and Minerva's bird
seems sometimes not ill-fitted with the face of Momus--these and their
thousand intermediates have tried in all ages to define that quaint
enigma, Man: and I wot not that any pundit of literature hath better
succeeded than the nameless, fameless man--or woman, was it?--or haply
some innocent shrewd child--who whilom did enunciate that MAN IS A
WRITING ANIMAL: true as arithmetic, clear as the sunbeam, rational
as Euclid, a discerning, just, exclusive definition. That he is "capable
of laughter," is well enough even for thy deathless fame, O Stagyrite!
but equally (so Buffon testifies) are apes and monkeys, horses and
hyenas; whether perforce of tickling or sympathy, or native notions of
the humorous, we will not stop to contend. That he actually is "an
animal whose best wisdom is laughter," hath but little reason in it,
Democrite, seeing there are such obvious anomalies among men as suicidal
jesters and cachinating idiots; nevertheless, my punster of Abdera, thy
whimsical fancy, surviving the wreck of dynasties, and too light to sink
in the billows of oblivion, is now become the popular thought, the
fashionable dress of heretofore moping wisdom: crow, an thou wilt, jolly
old chanticleer, but remember thee thou crowest on a dunghill; man is
not a mere merry-andrew. Neither is he exclusively "a weeping animal,"
lugubrious Heraclite, no better definer than thy laughter-loving foe:
that man weeps, or ought to weep, the world within him and the world
without him indeed bear testimony: but is he the only mourner in this
valley of grief, this travailing creation? No, no; they walk lengthily
in black procession: yet is this present writing not the fit season for
enlarging upon sorrows; we must not now mourn and be desolate as a poor
bird grieving for its pilfered young--is Macduff's lamentable cry for
his lost little ones, "All--what, all?" more piteous?--we must now
indulge in despondent fears, like yonder hard-run stag, with terror in
his eye, and true tears coursing down his melancholy face: we must not
now mourn over cruelty and ingratitude, like that poor old worn-out
horse, crying--positively crying, and looking imploringly for merciful
rest into man's iron face; we must not scream like the wounded hare, nor
beat against our cage like the wild bird prisoned from its freedom.
Moreover, Heraclite, even in thine own day thou mightest well have heard
of the classic wailings of Philomel for Atys, or of consumptive Canens,
that shadow of a voice, for her metamorphosed Pie, and have known that
very crocodiles have tears: pass on, thy desolate definition hath not
served for man.

With flippant tongue a mercantile cosmopolite, stable in statistics and
learned in the leger, here interposes an erudite suggestion: "Man is a
calculating animal." Surely, so he is, unless he be a spendthrift; but
he still shares his quality with others; for the squirrel hoards his
nuts, the aunt lays in her barley-corns, the moon knoweth her seasons,
and the sun his going down: moreover, Chinese slates, multiplying
rulers, and, as their aggregated wisdom, Babbage's machine, will stoutly
contest so mechanical a fancy. Savoury steams, and those too smelling
strongly of truth, assault the nostrils, as a Vitellite--what a name of
hungry omen for the imperial devourer!--plausibly insinuates man to be
"a cooking animal." Who can gainsay it? and wherewithal, but with
domesticated monkeys, does he share this happy attribute? It is true,
the butcher-bird spits his prey on a thorn, the slow epicurean boa
glazes his mashed antelope, the king of vultures quietly waits for a
gamey taste and the rapid roasting of the tropics: but all this care,
all this caloric, cannot be accounted culinary, and without a question,
the kitchen _is_ a sphere where the lord of creation reigns supreme:
still, thou best of practical philosophers, caterer for daily
dinners--man--MAN, I say, is not altogether a compact of edible
commons, a Falstaff pudding-bag robbed of his seasoning wit, a mere
congeries of food and pickles; moreover, honest Gingel of "fair" fame
hath (or used to have, "in my warm youth, when George the Third was
king,") automatons, [pray, observe, Sosii, I am not pedant or wiseacre
enough to indite _automata_; we conquering Britons stole that word among
many others from poor dead Greece, who couldn't want it; having made it
ours in the singular, why be bashful about the plural! So also of
memorandums, omnibuses, [you remember Farren's _omni_BI!]
necropolises, gymnasiums, eukeirogeneions, and other unlegacied
property of dear departed Rome and Greece. All this, as you see,
is clearly parenthetical;] well, then, Gingel has automatons, that will
serve you up all kinds of delicate viands, pleasant meats, and
choice cates by clock-work, to say nothing of Jones' patent
all-in-a-moment-any-thing-whatsoever cooking apparatus: no mine
Apiciite, Heliogabalite, Sardanapalite, Seftonite, Udite, thou of
extravagant ancestry and indifferent digestion; little, indeed, as you
may credit me, man is not all stomach, nor altogether formed alone for
feeding. Remember AEsop's parable, the belly and the members; and, above
them all, do not overlook the head.

What think you then of "a featherless biped?" gravely suggests a rusty
Plinyite. Absolute sir, and most obsolete Roman, doubtless you never had
the luck to set eyes upon a turkey at Christmas; the poor bare _bipes
implumis_, a forked creature, waiting to be forked supererogatively; ay,
and _risibilis_ to boot, if ever all concomitants of the hearty old
festival were properly provocative of decent mirth. Thus then return we
to our muttons, and time enough, quotha: literary pundit, (whose is the
notable saying?) thy definition is bomb-proof, thy fancy unscaleable,
thy thought too deep for undermining; that notion is at the head of the
poll, a candidate approved of Truth's most open borough; for, in spite
of secretary-birds with pens stuck clerk-like behind their ears (as
useless an emblem of sinecure office as gold keys, silver, and
coronation armour)--in spite of whole flights of geese, capable enough
of saving capitols, but impotent to wield one of their own
all-conquering quills--in spite, also, (keen-eyed categorists, be to my
faults in ratiocination a little blind, for very cheerfulness,) in
spite, I say, of copying presses, manifold inditers, and automaton
artists, MAN IS A WRITING ANIMAL.

Wearily enough, you will think, have we disposed of this one definition:
but recollect, and take me for a son of leisure, an amateur tourist of
Parnassus, an idling gatherer of way-side flowers in the vale of
Thessaly, a careless, unbusied, "contemplative man," recreating himself
by gentle craft on the banks of much-poached Helicon; and if you, my
casual friend, be neither like-minded in fancy nor like-fitted in
leisure, courteously consider that we may not travel well together: at
this station let us stop, freely forgiving each other for mutual
misliking; to your books, to your business, to your fowling, to your
feasting, to your mummery, to your nunnery--go: my track lays away from
the highroad, in and out between yonder hills, among thickets, mossy
rocks, green hollows, high fern, and the tangled hair of hiding
river-gods; I meet not pedlers and bagsmen, but stumble upon fawns just
dropped, and do not scare their doting mothers; I quench not my noonday
thirst with fiery drams from a brazen tap, but, lying over the cold
brook, drink to its musical Naiades; I walk no dusty roads of a
working-day world, but flit upon the pleasant places of one made up of
holidays.

A truce to this truancy, and method be my maxim: let us for a moment
link our reasonings, and solder one stray rivet; man being a writing
animal, there still remains the question, what is writing? Ah, there's
the rub: a very comfortable definition would it be, if every pen-holder
and pen-wiper could truly claim that kingship of the universe--that
imagery of his Maker--that mystical, marvellous, immortal, intellectual,
abstraction, manhood: but, what then is WRITING? Ye tons of
invoices, groaning shelves of incalculable legers, parchment abhorrences
of rare Charles Lamb, we think not now of you; dreary piles of
unhealthy-looking law-books, hypochondriacal heaps of medical
experiences, plodding folios of industrious polemics, slow elaborations
of learned dullness, we spare your native dust; letters unnumbered, in
all stages of cacography, both physical and metaphysical, alack! most of
you must slip through the meshes of our definition yet unwove; poor
deciduous leaves of the forest, that, at your best, serve only--it is
yet a good purpose--to dress the common soil of human kindness, without
attaining to the praise of wreaths and chaplets ever hanging in the
Muses' temple; flowers withered on the stalk, whose blooming beauty no
lover's hand has dropped upon the sacred waters of Siloa, like the
Hindoo's garland on her Ganges; prolix, vain, ephemeral letters
(especially enveloped penny-posters)--and sparing only some few redolent
of truth, wisdom, and affection--your bulky majority of flippant trash,
staid advices, dunnings, hoaxings, lyings, and slanderings, degrade you
to a lower rank than that we take on us to designate as "writing."

And what, O what--"how poor is he that hath not patience!"--shall we
predicate of the average viscera of circulating libraries?--abominable
viscera!--isn't that the word, my young Hippocrates?--A parley--a
parley! and the terms of truce are these: If this present pastime of
mine (for pastime it is, so spurn not at its logic,) be mercifully
looked on by you, lady novelists and male dittoes--yet truly there are
giants in your ranks, as Scott, and Ward, and Hugo, and Le Sage,
towering above ten thousand pigmies--if I be spared your censures
well-deserved, interchangeably as toward your authorships will I
exercise the charitable wisdom of silence: a white flag or a white
feather is my best alternative in soothing or avoiding so terrible a
host; and verily, to speak kinder of those whose wit, and genius, and
graphic powers have so smoothed this old world's wrinkled face of care,
many brilliant, many clever, many well-intended caterers to public
amusement, throng your ill-ordered ranks: still, there are numbered to
your shame as followers of the fool's-cap standard, the huge corrupting
mass of depraved moralists, meagre trash-inditers, treacherous
scandal-mongers, men about town who immortalize their shame, and the
dull, pernicious school of feather-brained Romancists: and take this
sentence for a true one, a _verum-dictum_. But enough, there are others,
and those not few, even far less veniable; ye priers into family
secrets--fawning, false guests at the great man's open house, eagerly
jotting down with paricidal pen the unguarded conversation of the
hospitable board--shame on your treason, on its wages, and its fame! ye
countless gatherers and disposers of other men's stuff; chiels amang us
takin' notes, an' faith, to prent 'em too, perpetually, without
mitigation or remorse; ye men of paste and scissors, who so often
falsely, feebly, faithlessly, and tastelessly are patching into a
Harlequin whole the _disjecta membra_ of some great hacked-up
reputation; can such as ye are tell me what it is to write? Writing is
the concreted fruit of thinking, the original expression of new
combinations of idea, the fresh chemical product of educational
compounds long simmering in the mind, the possession of a sixth sense,
distinguishing intelligence, and proclaiming it to the four winds;
writing is not labour, but ease; not care, but happiness; not the petty
pilferings of poverty, but the large overflowings of mental affluence;
it begs not on the highway, but gives great largess, like a king; it
preys not on a neighbour's wealth, but enriches him; it may light,
indeed, a lamp, at another's candle, but pays him back with brilliancy;
it may borrow fire from the common stock, but uses it for genial warmth
and noble hospitality.

Copyright (c) 2007. topboookz.com. All rights reserved.