Miss Mant - "Christmas, A Happy Time"

Victor Appleton - "Tom Swift in the City of Gold"

Henry Woodcock - "The Hero of the Humber"

Mark Twain - "Chapters from My Autobiography"

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.

Essays, First Series

R >> Ralph Waldo Emerson >> Essays, First Series




Every thing the individual sees without him corresponds to
his states of mind, and every thing is in turn intelligible
to him, as his onward thinking leads him into the truth to
which that fact or series belongs.

The primeval world,--the Fore-World, as the Germans say,
--I can dive to it in myself as well as grope for it with
researching fingers in catacombs, libraries, and the broken
reliefs and torsos of ruined villas.

What is the foundation of that interest all men feel in
Greek history, letters, art, and poetry, in all its periods
from the Heroic or Homeric age down to the domestic life of
the Athenians and Spartans, four or five centuries later?
What but this, that every man passes personally through a
Grecian period. The Grecian state is the era of the bodily
nature, the perfection of the senses,--of the spiritual
nature unfolded in strict unity with the body. In it existed
those human forms which supplied the sculptor with his
models of Hercules, Phoebus, and Jove; not like the forms
abounding in the streets of modern cities, wherein the face
is a confused blur of features, but composed of incorrupt,
sharply defined and symmetrical features, whose eye-sockets
are so formed that it would be impossible for such eyes to
squint and take furtive glances on this side and on that, but
they must turn the whole head. The manners of that period are
plain and fierce. The reverence exhibited is for personal
qualities; courage, address, self-command, justice, strength,
swiftness, a loud voice, a broad chest. Luxury and elegance
are not known. A sparse population and want make every man his
own valet, cook, butcher and soldier, and the habit of supplying
his own needs educates the body to wonderful performances. Such
are the Agamemnon and Diomed of Homer, and not far different is
the picture Xenophon gives of himself and his compatriots in the
Retreat of the Ten Thousand. "After the army had crossed the
river Teleboas in Armenia, there fell much snow, and the troops
lay miserably on the ground covered with it. But Xenophon arose
naked, and taking an axe, began to split wood; whereupon others
rose and did the like." Throughout his army exists a boundless
liberty of speech. They quarrel for plunder, they wrangle with
the generals on each new order, and Xenophon is as sharp-tongued
as any and sharper-tongued than most, and so gives as good as he
gets. Who does not see that this is a gang of great boys, with
such a code of honor and such lax discipline as great boys have?

The costly charm of the ancient tragedy, and indeed of all the
old literature, is that the persons speak simply,--speak as
persons who have great good sense without knowing it, before
yet the reflective habit has become the predominant habit of
the mind. Our admiration of the antique is not admiration of
the old, but of the natural. The Greeks are not reflective, but
perfect in their senses and in their health, with the finest
physical organization in the world. Adults acted with the
simplicity and grace of children. They made vases, tragedies,
and statues, such as healthy senses should,--that is, in good
taste. Such things have continued to be made in all ages, and
are now, wherever a healthy physique exists; but, as a class,
from their superior organization, they have surpassed all. They
combine the energy of manhood with the engaging unconsciousness
of childhood. The attraction of these manners is that they
belong to man, and are known to every man in virtue of his
being once a child; besides that there are always individuals
who retain these characteristics. A person of childlike genius
and inborn energy is still a Greek, and revives our love of the
Muse of Hellas. I admire the love of nature in the Philoctetes.
In reading those fine apostrophes to sleep, to the stars, rocks,
mountains and waves, I feel time passing away as an ebbing sea.
I feel the eternity of man, the identity of his thought. The
Greek had it seems the same fellow-beings as I. The sun and moon,
water and fire, met his heart precisely as they meet mine. Then
the vaunted distinction between Greek and English, between Classic
and Romantic schools, seems superficial and pedantic. When a
thought of Plato becomes a thought to me,--when a truth that
fired the soul of Pindar fires mine, time is no more. When I
feel that we two meet in a perception, that our two souls are
tinged with the same hue, and do as it were run into one, why
should I measure degrees of latitude, why should I count
Egyptian years?

The student interprets the age of chivalry by his own
age of chivalry, and the days of maritime adventure
and circumnavigation by quite parallel miniature
experiences of his own. To the sacred history of the
world he has the same key. When the voice of a prophet
out of the deeps of antiquity merely echoes to him a
sentiment of his infancy, a prayer of his youth, he then
pierces to the truth through all the confusion of
tradition and the caricature of institutions.

Rare, extravagant spirits come by us at intervals, who
disclose to us new facts in nature. I see that men of
God have from time to time walked among men and made
their commission felt in the heart and soul of the
commonest hearer. Hence evidently the tripod, the
priest, the priestess inspired by the divine afflatus.

Jesus astonishes and overpowers sensual people. They
cannot unite him to history, or reconcile him with
themselves. As they come to revere their intuitions
and aspire to live holily, their own piety explains
every fact, every word.

How easily these old worships of Moses, of Zoroaster,
of Menu, of Socrates, domesticate themselves in the
mind. I cannot find any antiquity in them. They are
mine as much as theirs.

I have seen the first monks and anchorets, without
crossing seas or centuries. More than once some
individual has appeared to me with such negligence of
labor and such commanding contemplation, a haughty
beneficiary begging in the name of God, as made good
to the nineteenth century Simeon the Stylite, the
Thebais, and the first Capuchins.

The priestcraft of the East and West, of the Magian,
Brahmin, Druid, and Inca, is expounded in the individual's
private life. The cramping influence of a hard formalist
on a young child, in repressing his spirits and courage,
paralyzing the understanding, and that without producing
indignation, but only fear and obedience, and even much
sympathy with the tyranny,--is a familiar fact, explained
to the child when he becomes a man, only by seeing that
the oppressor of his youth is himself a child tyrannized
over by those names and words and forms of whose influence
he was merely the organ to the youth. The fact teaches him
how Belus was worshipped and how the Pyramids were built,
better than the discovery by Champollion of the names of
all the workmen and the cost of every tile. He finds
Assyria and the Mounds of Cholula at his door, and himself
has laid the courses.

Again, in that protest which each considerate person
makes against the superstition of his times, he
repeats step for step the part of old reformers, and
in the search after truth finds, like them, new perils
to virtue. He learns again what moral vigor is needed
to supply the girdle of a superstition. A great
licentiousness treads on the heels of a reformation.
How many times in the history of the world has the
Luther of the day had to lament the decay of piety in
his own household! "Doctor," said his wife to Martin
Luther, one day, "how is it that whilst subject to
papacy we prayed so often and with such fervor, whilst
now we pray with the utmost coldness and very seldom?"

The advancing man discovers how deep a property he has
in literature,--in all fable as well as in all history.
He finds that the poet was no odd fellow who described
strange and impossible situations, but that universal
man wrote by his pen a confession true for one and true
for all. His own secret biography he finds in lines
wonderfully intelligible to him, dotted down before he
was born. One after another he comes up in his private
adventures with every fable of Aesop, of Homer, of Hafiz,
of Ariosto, of Chaucer, of Scott, and verifies them with
his own head and hands.

The beautiful fables of the Greeks, being proper
creations of the imagination and not of the fancy, are
universal verities. What a range of meanings and what
perpetual pertinence has the story of Prometheus!
Beside its primary value as the first chapter of the
history of Europe, (the mythology thinly veiling
authentic facts, the invention of the mechanic arts
and the migration of colonies,) it gives the history
of religion, with some closeness to the faith of later
ages. Prometheus is the Jesus of the old mythology. He
is the friend of man; stands between the unjust "justice"
of the Eternal Father and the race of mortals, and readily
suffers all things on their account. But where it departs
from the Calvinistic Christianity and exhibits him as the
defier of Jove, it represents a state of mind which readily
appears wherever the doctrine of Theism is taught in a
crude, objective form, and which seems the self-defence
of man against this untruth, namely a discontent with
the believed fact that a God exists, and a feeling
that the obligation of reverence is onerous. It would
steal if it could the fire of the Creator, and live
apart from him and independent of him. The Prometheus
Vinctus is the romance of skepticism. Not less true to
all time are the details of that stately apologue.
Apollo kept the flocks of Admetus, said the poets.
When the gods come among men, they are not known.
Jesus was not; Socrates and Shakspeare were not.
Antaeus was suffocated by the gripe of Hercules, but
every time he touched his mother earth his strength
was renewed. Man is the broken giant, and in all his
weakness both his body and his mind are invigorated
by habits of conversation with nature. The power of
music, the power of poetry, to unfix and as it were
clap wings to solid nature, interprets the riddle of
Orpheus. The philosophical perception of identity
through endless mutations of form makes him know the
Proteus. What else am I who laughed or wept yesterday,
who slept last night like a corpse, and this morning
stood and ran? And what see I on any side but the
transmigrations of Proteus? I can symbolize my thought
by using the name of any creature, of any fact, because
every creature is man agent or patient. Tantalus is
but a name for you and me. Tantalus means the
impossibility of drinking the waters of thought which
are always gleaming and waving within sight of the soul.
The transmigration of souls is no fable. I would it were;
but men and women are only half human. Every animal of
the barn-yard, the field and the forest, of the earth
and of the waters that are under the earth, has contrived
to get a footing and to leave the print of its features
and form in some one or other of these upright, heaven-
facing speakers. Ah! brother, stop the ebb of thy soul,
--ebbing downward into the forms into whose habits thou
hast now for many years slid. As near and proper to us
is also that old fable of the Sphinx, who was said to
sit in the road-side and put riddles to every passenger.
If the man could not answer, she swallowed him alive. If
he could solve the riddle, the Sphinx was slain. What is
our life but an endless flight of winged facts or events?
In splendid variety these changes come, all putting
questions to the human spirit. Those men who cannot answer
by a superior wisdom these facts or questions of time,
serve them. Facts encumber them, tyrannize over them, and
make the men of routine, the men of sense, in whom a
literal obedience to facts has extinguished every spark
of that light by which man is truly man. But if the man
is true to his better instincts or sentiments, and refuses
the dominion of facts, as one that comes of a higher race;
remains fast by the soul and sees the principle, then the
facts fall aptly and supple into their places; they know
their master, and the meanest of them glorifies him.

See in Goethe's Helena the same desire that every word
should be a thing. These figures, he would say, these
Chirons, Griffins, Phorkyas, Helen and Leda, are
somewhat, and do exert a specific influence on the
mind. So far then are they eternal entities, as real
to-day as in the first Olympiad. Much revolving them
he writes out freely his humor, and gives them body
to his own imagination. And although that poem be as
vague and fantastic as a dream, yet is it much more
attractive than the more regular dramatic pieces of
the same author, for the reason that it operates a
wonderful relief to the mind from the routine of
customary images,--awakens the reader's invention
and fancy by the wild freedom of the design, and by
the unceasing succession of brisk shocks of surprise.

The universal nature, too strong for the petty nature
of the bard, sits on his neck and writes through his
hand; so that when he seems to vent a mere caprice and
wild romance, the issue is an exact allegory. Hence
Plato said that "poets utter great and wise things
which they do not themselves understand." All the
fictions of the Middle Age explain themselves as a
masked or frolic expression of that which in grave
earnest the mind of that period toiled to achieve.
Magic and all that is ascribed to it is a deep
presentiment of the powers of science. The shoes of
swiftness, the sword of sharpness, the power of
subduing the elements, of using the secret virtues of
minerals, of understanding the voices of birds, are
the obscure efforts of the mind in a right direction.
The preternatural prowess of the hero, the gift of
perpetual youth, and the like, are alike the endeavour
of the human spirit "to bend the shows of things to
the desires of the mind."

In Perceforest and Amadis de Gaul a garland and a
rose bloom on the head of her who is faithful, and
fade on the brow of the inconstant. In the story of
the Boy and the Mantle even a mature reader may be
surprised with a glow of virtuous pleasure at the
triumph of the gentle Venelas; and indeed all the
postulates of elfin annals,--that the fairies do not
like to be named; that their gifts are capricious and
not to be trusted; that who seeks a treasure must not
speak; and the like,--I find true in Concord, however
they might be in Cornwall or Bretagne.

Is it otherwise in the newest romance? I read the
Bride of Lammermoor. Sir William Ashton is a mask for
a vulgar temptation, Ravenswood Castle a fine name for
proud poverty, and the foreign mission of state only a
Bunyan disguise for honest industry. We may all shoot
a wild bull that would toss the good and beautiful, by
fighting down the unjust and sensual. Lucy Ashton is
another name for fidelity, which is always beautiful
and always liable to calamity in this world.



But along with the civil and metaphysical history of
man, another history goes daily forward,--that of
the external world,--in which he is not less strictly
implicated. He is the compend of time; he is also the
correlative of nature. His power consists in the
multitude of his affinities, in the fact that his life
is intertwined with the whole chain of organic and
inorganic being. In old Rome the public roads
beginning at the Forum proceeded north, south, east,
west, to the centre of every province of the empire,
making each market-town of Persia, Spain and Britain
pervious to the soldiers of the capital: so out of the
human heart go as it were highways to the heart of
every object in nature, to reduce it under the
dominion of man. A man is a bundle of relations, a
knot of roots, whose flower and fruitage is the world.
His faculties refer to natures out of him and predict
the world he is to inhabit, as the fins of the fish
foreshow that water exists, or the wings of an eagle
in the egg presuppose air. He cannot live without a
world. Put Napoleon in an island prison, let his
faculties find no men to act on, no Alps to climb, no
stake to play for, and he would beat the air, and
appear stupid. Transport him to large countries, dense
population, complex interests and antagonist power,
and you shall see that the man Napoleon, bounded that
is by such a profile and outline, is not the virtual
Napoleon. This is but Talbot's shadow;--

"His substance is not here.
For what you see is but the smallest part
And least proportion of humanity;
But were the whole frame here,
It is of such a spacious, lofty pitch,
Your roof were not sufficient to contain it."
Henry VI.

Columbus needs a planet to shape his course upon.
Newton and Laplace need myriads of age and thick-strewn
celestial areas. One may say a gravitating solar system
is already prophesied in the nature of Newton's mind.
Not less does the brain of Davy or of Gay-Lussac, from
childhood exploring the affinities and repulsions of
particles, anticipate the laws of organization. Does not
the eye of the human embryo predict the light? the ear of
Handel predict the witchcraft of harmonic sound? Do not
the constructive fingers of Watt, Fulton, Whittemore,
Arkwright, predict the fusible, hard, and temperable
texture of metals, the properties of stone, water, and
wood? Do not the lovely attributes of the maiden child
predict the refinements and decorations of civil society?
Here also we are reminded of the action of man on man. A
mind might ponder its thought for ages and not gain so
much self-knowledge as the passion of love shall teach it
in a day. Who knows himself before he has been thrilled
with indignation at an outrage, or has heard an eloquent
tongue, or has shared the throb of thousands in a national
exultation or alarm? No man can antedate his experience,
or guess what faculty or feeling a new object shall unlock,
any more than he can draw to-day the face of a person whom
he shall see to-morrow for the first time.

I will not now go behind the general statement to explore
the reason of this correspondency. Let it suffice that in
the light of these two facts, namely, that the mind is One,
and that nature is its correlative, history is to be read
and written.

Thus in all ways does the soul concentrate and reproduce
its treasures for each pupil. He too shall pass through
the whole cycle of experience. He shall collect into a
focus the rays of nature. History no longer shall be a
dull book. It shall walk incarnate in every just and wise
man. You shall not tell me by languages and titles a
catalogue of the volumes you have read. You shall make me
feel what periods you have lived. A man shall be the Temple
of Fame. He shall walk, as the poets have described that
goddess, in a robe painted all over with wonderful events
and experiences;--his own form and features by their
exalted intelligence shall be that variegated vest. I
shall find in him the Foreworld; in his childhood the Age
of Gold, the Apples of Knowledge, the Argonautic Expedition,
the calling of Abraham, the building of the Temple, the
Advent of Christ, Dark Ages, the Revival of Letters, the
Reformation, the discovery of new lands, the opening of new
sciences and new regions in man. He shall be the priest of
Pan, and bring with him into humble cottages the blessing of
the morning stars, and all the recorded benefits of heaven
and earth.

Is there somewhat overweening in this claim? Then I reject
all I have written, for what is the use of pretending to
know what we know not? But it is the fault of our rhetoric
that we cannot strongly state one fact without seeming to
belie some other. I hold our actual knowledge very cheap.
Hear the rats in the wall, see the lizard on the fence, the
fungus under foot, the lichen on the log. What do I know
sympathetically, morally, of either of these worlds of life?
As old as the Caucasian man,--perhaps older,--these creatures
have kept their counsel beside him, and there is no record of
any word or sign that has passed from one to the other. What
connection do the books show between the fifty or sixty
chemical elements and the historical eras? Nay, what does
history yet record of the metaphysical annals of man? What
light does it shed on those mysteries which we hide under the
names Death and Immortality? Yet every history should be
written in a wisdom which divined the range of our affinities
and looked at facts as symbols. I am ashamed to see what a
shallow village tale our so-called History is. How many times
we must say Rome, and Paris, and Constantinople! What does
Rome know of rat and lizard? What are Olympiads and Consulates
to these neighboring systems of being? Nay, what food or
experience or succor have they for the Esquimaux seal-hunter,
for the Kanaka in his canoe, for the fisherman, the stevedore,
the porter?

Broader and deeper we must write our annals,--from an ethical
reformation, from an influx of the ever new, ever sanative
conscience,--if we would trulier express our central and wide-
related nature, instead of this old chronology of selfishness
and pride to which we have too long lent our eyes. Already that
day exists for us, shines in on us at unawares, but the path of
science and of letters is not the way into nature. The idiot,
the Indian, the child and unschooled farmer's boy stand nearer
to the light by which nature is to be read, than the dissector
or the antiquary.





SELF-RELIANCE.

"Ne te quaesiveris extra."

"Man is his own star; and the soul that can
Render an honest and a perfect man,
Commands all light, all influence, all fate;
Nothing to him falls early or too late.
Our acts our angels are, or good or ill,
Our fatal shadows that walk by us still."

Epilogue to Beaumont and Fletcher's Honest Man's Fortune.



Cast the bantling on the rocks,
Suckle him with the she-wolf's teat,
Wintered with the hawk and fox.
Power and speed be hands and feet.



II.
SELF-RELIANCE.

I READ the other day some verses written by an eminent
painter which were original and not conventional. The
soul always hears an admonition in such lines, let the
subject be what it may. The sentiment they instil is of
more value than any thought they may contain. To believe
your own thought, to believe that what is true for you
in your private heart is true for all men,--that is genius.
Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal
sense; for the inmost in due time becomes the outmost, and
our first thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets
of the Last Judgment. Familiar as the voice of the mind
is to each, the highest merit we ascribe to Moses, Plato
and Milton is that they set at naught books and traditions,
and spoke not what men, but what they thought. A man should
learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes
across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the
firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without
notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of
genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come
back to us with a certain alienated majesty. Great works
of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They
teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good-
humored inflexibility then most when the whole cry of voices
is on the other side. Else to-morrow a stranger will say
with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and
felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame
our own opinion from another.

There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at
the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is
suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as
his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good,
no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his
toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to
till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and
none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he
know until he has tried. Not for nothing one face, one character,
one fact, makes much impression on him, and another none. This
sculpture in the memory is not without preestablished harmony.
The eye was placed where one ray should fall, that it might
testify of that particular ray. We but half express ourselves,
and are ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represents.
It may be safely trusted as proportionate and of good issues,
so it be faithfully imparted, but God will not have his work
made manifest by cowards. A man is relieved and gay when he has
put his heart into his work and done his best; but what he has
said or done otherwise shall give him no peace. It is a
deliverance which does not deliver. In the attempt his genius
deserts him; no muse befriends; no invention, no hope.

Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept
the place the divine providence has found for you, the society
of your contemporaries, the connection of events. Great men
have always done so, and confided themselves childlike to the
genius of their age, betraying their perception that the
absolutely trustworthy was seated at their heart, working
through their hands, predominating in all their being. And
we are now men, and must accept in the highest mind the same
transcendent destiny; and not minors and invalids in a protected
corner, not cowards fleeing before a revolution, but guides,
redeemers and benefactors, obeying the Almighty effort and
advancing on Chaos and the Dark.

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