Laura Lee Hope - "The Outdoor Girls at Bluff Point"

Charles Bennett - "The Frog Who Would A Wooing Go"

Alexandre Dumas - "Bric à brac"

Unknown - "The Defenders of Democracy"

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 Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860

V >> Various >> The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860




Perhaps it is of no great consequence what it was in the composition
which set her off into this nervous paroxysm. She was in such a state
that almost any slight agitation would have brought on the attack, and
it was the accident of her transient excitability, very probably, which
made a trifling cause the seeming occasion of so much disturbance.
The theme was signed, in the same peculiar, sharp, slender hand, _E.
Venner_, and was, of course, written by that wild-looking girl who had
excited the master's curiosity and prompted his question, as before
mentioned.

The next morning the lady-teacher looked pale and wearied, naturally
enough, but she was in her place at the usual hour, and Master Langdon
in his own. The girls had not yet entered the schoolroom.

"You have been ill, I am afraid," said Mr. Bernard.

"I was not well yesterday," she answered. "I had a worry and a kind of
fright. It is so dreadful to have the charge of all these young souls
and bodies! Every young girl ought to walk, locked close, arm in arm,
between two guardian angels. Sometimes I faint almost with the thought
of all that I ought to do, and of my own weakness and wants--Tell me,
are there not natures born so out of parallel with the lines of natural
law that nothing short of a miracle can bring them right?"

Mr. Bernard had speculated somewhat, as all thoughtful persons of his
profession are forced to do, on the innate organic tendencies with which
individuals, families, and races are born. He replied, therefore, with
a smile, as one to whom the question suggested a very familiar class of
facts.

"Why, of course. Each of us is only footing-up of a double column of
figures that goes back to the first pair. Every unit tells,--and some of
them are _plus_, and some _minus_. If the columns don't add up right, it
is commonly because we can't make out all the figures. I don't mean to
say that something may not be added by Nature to make up for losses and
keep the race to its average, but we are mainly nothing but the answer
to a long sum in addition and subtraction. No doubt there are people
born with impulses at every possible angle to the parallels of Nature,
as you call them. If they happen to cut these at right angles, of course
they are beyond the reach of common influences. Slight obliquities are
what we have most to do with in education. Penitentiaries and insane
asylums take care of most of the right-angle cases.--I am afraid I have
put it too much like a professor, and I am only a student, you know.
Pray, what set you--"

The next morning the lady-teacher took to asking me this? "Any strange
cases among the scholars?"

The meek teacher's blue eyes met the luminous glance that came with the
question. She, too, was of gentle blood,--not meaning by that that she
was of any noted lineage, but that she came of a cultivated stock, never
rich, but long trained to intellectual callings. A thousand decencies,
amenities, reticences, graces, which no one thinks of until he misses
them, are the traditional right of those who spring from such families.
And when two persons of this exceptional breeding meet in the midst of
the common multitude, they seek each other's company at once by the
natural law of elective affinity. It is wonderful how men and women know
their peers. If two stranger queens, sole survivors of two ship-wrecked
vessels, were cast, half-naked, on a rock together, each would at once
address the other as "Our Royal Sister."

Helen Darley looked into the dark eyes of Bernard Langdon glittering
with the light which flashed from them with his question. Not as those
foolish, innocent country-girls of the small village did she look into
them, to be fascinated and bewildered, but to sound them with a calm,
steadfast purpose. "A gentleman," she said to herself, as she read his
expression and his features with a woman's rapid, but exhausting glance.
"A lady," he said to himself, as he met her questioning look,--so brief,
so quiet, yet so assured, as of one whom necessity had taught to read
faces quickly without offence, as children read the faces of parents,
as wives read the faces of hard-souled husbands. All this was but a few
seconds' work, and yet the main point was settled. If there had been any
vulgar curiosity or coarseness of any kind lurking in his expression,
she would have detected it. If she had not lifted her eyes to his face
so softly and kept them there so calmly and withdrawn them so quietly,
he would not have said to himself, "She is a _lady_," for that word
meant a good deal to the descendant of the courtly Wentworths and the
scholarly Langdons.

"There are strange people everywhere, Mr. Langdon," she said, "and I
don't think our school-room is an exception. I am glad you believe in
the force of transmitted tendencies. It would break my heart, if I did
not think that there are faults beyond the reach of everything but
God's special grace. I should die, if I thought that my negligence or
incapacity was alone responsible for the errors and sins of those I have
charge of. Yet there, are mysteries I do not know how to account for."
She looked all round the school-room, and then said, in a whisper, "Mr.
Langdon, we had a girl that _stole_, in the school, not long ago. Worse
than that, we had a girl that tried to set us on fire. Children of good
people, both of them. And we have a girl now that frightens me so"----

The door opened, and three misses came in to take their seats: three
types, as it happened, of certain classes, into which it would not have
been difficult to distribute the greater number of the girls in
the school.--_Hannah Martin_. Fourteen years and three months old.
Short-necked, thick-waisted, round-cheeked, smooth, vacant forehead,
large, dull eyes. Looks good-natured, with little other expression.
Three buns in her bag, and a large apple. Has a habit of attacking her
provisions in school-hours.--_Rosa Milburn_. Sixteen. Brunette, with
a rare ripe flush in her cheeks. Color comes and goes easily. Eyes
wandering, apt to be downcast. Moody at times. Said to be passionate,
if irritated. Finished in high relief. Carries shoulders well back and
walks well, as if proud of her woman's life, with a slight rocking
movement, being one of the wide-flanged pattern, but seems restless,--a
hard girl to look after. Has a romance in her pocket, which she means to
read in school-time.--_Charlotte Ann Wood_. Fifteen. The poetess before
mentioned. Long, light ringlets, pallid complexion, blue eyes. Delicate
child, half unfolded. Gentle, but languid and despondent. Does not go
much with the other girls, but reads a good deal, especially poetry,
underscoring favorite passages. Writes a great many verses, very fast,
not very correctly; full of the usual human sentiments, expressed in the
accustomed phrases. Undervitalized. Sensibilities not covered with their
normal integuments. A negative condition, often confounded with genius,
and sometimes running into it. Young people that _fall_ out of line
through weakness of the active faculties are often confounded with those
that _step_ out of it through strength of the intellectual ones.

The girls kept coming in, one after another, or in pairs or groups,
until the school-room was nearly full. Then there was a little pause,
and a light step was heard in the passage. The lady-teacher's eyes
turned to the door, and the master's followed them in the same
direction.

A girl of about seventeen entered. She was tall and slender, but
rounded, with a peculiar undulation of movement, such as one sometimes
sees in perfectly untutored country-girls, whom Nature, the queen of
graces, has taken in hand, but more commonly in connection with the
very highest breeding of the most thoroughly trained society. She was a
splendid scowling beauty, black-browed, with a flash of white teeth that
was always like a surprise when her lips parted. She wore a checkered
dress, of a curious pattern, and a camel's-hair scarf twisted a little
fantastically about her. She went to her seat, which she had moved a
short distance apart from the rest, and, sitting down, began playing
listlessly with her gold chain, as was a common habit with her, coiling
it and uncoiling it about her slender wrist, and braiding it in with her
long, delicate fingers. Presently she looked up. Black, piercing eyes,
not large,--a low forehead, as low as that of Clytie in the Townley
bust,--black hair, twisted in heavy braids,--a face that one could not
help looking at for its beauty, yet that one wanted to look away from
for something in its expression, and could not for those diamond eyes.
They were fixed on the lady-teacher now. The latter turned her own away,
and let them wander over the other scholars. But they could not help
coming back again for a single glance at the wild beauty. The diamond
eyes were on her still. She turned the leaves of several of her books,
as if in search of some passage, and, when she thought she had waited
long enough to be safe, once more stole a quick look at the dark girl.
The diamond eyes were still upon her. She put her kerchief to her
forehead, which had grown slightly moist; she sighed once, almost
shivered, for she felt cold; then, following some ill-defined impulse,
which she could not resist, she left her place and went to the young
girl's desk.

_"What do you want of me, Elsie Venner?_" It was a strange question to
put, for the girl had not signified that she wished the teacher to come
to her.

"Nothing," she said. "I thought I could make you come." The girl spoke
in a low tone, a kind of half-whisper. She did not lisp, yet her
articulation of one or two consonants was not absolutely perfect.

"Where did you get that flower, Elsie?" said Miss Darley. It was a rare
alpine flower, which was found only in one spot among the rocks of The
Mountain.

"Where it grew," said Elsie Venner. "Take it." The teacher could not
refuse her. The girl's finger-tips touched hers as she took it. How cold
they were for a girl of such an organization!

The teacher went back to her seat. She made an excuse for quitting the
school-room soon afterwards. The first thing she did was to fling the
flower into her fireplace and rake the ashes over it. The second was to
wash the tips of her fingers, as if she had been another Lady Macbeth. A
poor, overtasked, nervous creature,--we must not think too much of her
fancies.

After school was done, she finished the talk with the master which had
been so suddenly interrupted. There were things spoken of which may
prove interesting by-and-by, but there are other matters we must first
attend to. IS THE RELIGIOUS WANT OF THE AGE MET?


To answer this question intelligently, we must first glance at the
characteristics of the age. It is an age of remarkable activity. There
have been industrious men in other days; there have been nations of whom
it might be truly said, They were an industrious people, they lost no
time in idleness: but their rate of speed was low. Such a people could
hardly be deemed enterprising. They might continue uncomplainingly in
their accustomed round of labors, but would lack impulse to attempt
anything new. Circumstances did not compel them to unwonted efforts,
and their capabilities lay dormant. The world was wide, the population
comparatively sparse, and the means of subsistence not difficult of
attainment.

Our age is very unlike to that. People begin to crowd one another. There
is competition. The more active and ingenious will have the advantage;
they do have the advantage; and this fact is a constant stimulus. It has
been operating for thirty years past with ever-increasing power. We seem
to be approaching a climax,--a point beyond which flesh and blood cannot
go. The enterprise of the more active spirits of our day is astounding;
we begin to ask, "Will they stop at anything? What will they not
undertake?" There are a great many unsuccessful attempts; but these are
not necessarily observed, they pass quietly into obscurity, while we
hasten to observe the successes, which are wonderful, and so numerous
as to keep us ever on tiptoe, looking for new wonders. Having seen the
railways, the magnetic telegraph, and Hoe's press, in full operation,
and having been brought to accept these as a common measure of time and
motion, we find ourselves indisposed for older usages. We find our
age an age of daring and of doing. We are ready to discard the word
_impossible_; from our vocabulary; we deny that anything is the less
probable because of being unprecedented. For doing new things we look
about for new means,--being full charged with the belief that for all
worthy or desirable ends there must be adequate and available means.
In this regard, it is an age of unprecedented faith, of expectation of
success; and we all know the natural and necessary influence of such
an expectation. Sanguine expectation lights up the fires of genius;
invention is quickened for the attainment of the highest speed and the
greatest momentum. In no former age has there been anything to compare
in rapidity and power of movement with the every-day achievements of
this age. The relation of books to men, and the sphere assigned to
books, are materially modified by the characteristics of the age. Books,
as books, are no longer a charm to conjure with. The few really superior
books have a wider and greater influence than ever before; while
the great mass of common books have less, and pass more easily into
oblivion. Good books may and must help us; but books cannot make us men
of the nineteenth century, and a power in it. A thorough knowledge of
the world within us, as it stands related to the world without us, is
something quite different from mere book-knowledge. This is an element
of influence not only not confined to the bookmen, but often possessed
in a transcendent degree by those whose devotion to books is altogether
subordinate to other avocations. Our common-school education may be said
to bring the entire people upon a common plane. We are no longer the
esoteric and the exoteric; we understand our rights in the common fund
of sense and truth very well. We are not very patient with those who
affect to know better than ourselves what we want and what we ought to
desire. Most men are exceedingly in earnest, and determined to be heard
in their own cause, and well able to make themselves understood. Scribes
and Pharisees compassing sea and land to make one proselyte are
a good and bad type of our activity in the pursuit of our own ends.
Innumerable and infinitely varied are the shifts employed to secure
attention, to effect the sale of merchandise, and to increase income.
Nor are the learned professions much behind the men of merchandise. The
contest of life thickens. Competition for the fruits of labor waxes
continually more fierce. Mother Earth is too moderate in her labors; the
ranks of the producers suffer from desertion; the plough is forsaken;
the patient ox is contemned; silence, seclusion, and meditation are a
memory of the past. The world's axis is changed; there is more heat in
the North. The world has advanced, in our age, from a speed of five
miles an hour, to twenty or thirty, or more.

Whatever may be thought of the advantages and disadvantages accruing
from these movements, there can be no question of the fact, that they
have greatly affected the position and the relations of speakers and
hearers. The million have been driven to do so much for themselves, that
they are in no little danger of jumping to the conclusion, that they no
longer need teachers of religion. A conclusion so fraught with mischief
to the race will not be arrested by a pertinacious adhesion to modes of
preaching which men under the old-time training could be made to endure,
but which latter-day contrasts have rendered intolerable.

It is just here, if anywhere, that a special backwardness on the part of
the clergy to meet the religious wants of the age may, without injustice
or unkindness, be alleged. It comes about very naturally; the training
of the clergy is not in harmony with the exigencies of the position they
are intended to occupy. The endeavors of the preparatory schools are
not to be depreciated. It is scarcely possible to say too much of the
fundamental importance of thoroughness and of minute accuracy in the
rudiments of learning. But that extreme zeal in this behalf has produced
an unnatural divorce of the practical from the critical, it is vain
to deny. The devotion to the latter, which is inaugurated in the
preparatory school, is by the college inflamed to the utmost, and
the young man reaches his climax when he receives the appointment of
valedictorian; that is his end; he reaches it, and we may say it is
the death of him. He may, indeed, enter the theological seminary,
industriously resolved on more of the same supremacy; but, in most
instances, the great practical ends of a Christ-like life of doing good
have been already lost from his view, and the ways and means by which
alone such ends can be reached have become offensive to him. The
student, as he delights in calling himself, has become greatly more
interested in knowledge than in the people for whom he is to use his
knowledge. A certain unknown God, an idol, in short, quite unsuspected,
whose name is _Critical Dignity_, is installed in his heart, in
the place of the Son of God. And the man endures the trials of his
ministerial life under the mistaken impression that he is a martyr for
Christ. He compels himself to be satisfied with a measure of attention
to his utterances, which would content no sane and sensible man in any
other department of teaching. He will tell you that it is one of the
inevitable infelicities of his vocation, that to nothing are men such
unwilling listeners as to religious truth; than which nothing can
be more untrue; for to nothing are men so prepared to listen as to
religious truth, properly presented.

In order to a more generally happy and successful prosecution of the
duties of a minister of Christ, a preliminary fact requires to be
considered. That a man is found or finds himself in any calling is no
evidence whatever that he is fitted for that calling. This is just as
true of the ministry as of any other vocation. Every man-of-business
knows this. The clergy seem to us behind the age in being astonishingly
blind to it. Men-of-business know that only a very small fraction of
their number can ever attain eminent success. They know, that, in a term
of twenty years, ninety-seven men in a hundred _fail_. Here and there
one develops a remarkable talent for the specific business in which he
is engaged. The ninety-and-nine discover that they have a weary contest
to maintain with manifold contingencies and combinations which no
foresight can preclude.

The application of this general truth to their profession the clergy are
backward to perceive. The consequences of this backwardness are very
hurtful to their interests. Because of this, we have an indefinite
amount of puerile and undignified complaint from disappointed men, of
disingenuous misrepresentation from incompetent men, who have entered
upon labors they were never fitted to accomplish. Such men undertake
their labors in ways that want and must want the Divine sanction; and
they are tempted to ward off a just verdict of unsuitableness and of
incompetency by bringing many and grievous charges against their
flocks. "A mania for church-extending"; "a hankering for architectural
splendor"; "or for discursive and satirical preaching"; "or for
something florid or profound": these and the like imputations have
been put forward, as a screen, by many an unsuccessful preacher, who
failed,--simply failed,--not in selling horns or hides, shirtings or
sugars,--but failed to recommend Christ and his gospel,--failed for want
of head, or heart, or industry, or all three.

The man who embarks his all in hardware, drugs, or law, runs the risk
of failure. If his neighbor can rise earlier, walk faster, talk faster,
work harder, and hold on longer, he will get the avails that might
suffice for both. This unalterable fact every business-man accepts.

Do you inquire, To what good purpose do you thrust the possibility of
failure upon the attention of the candidate for the ministry? Would you
utterly discourage those who are already more alive to the perils of
their undertaking than we could wish them?

We answer, It is no kindness to encourage men to enter a ministry whose
inexorable requirements and whose incidental possibilities they may
not look in the face. It is no kindness to represent to them that the
qualities which they possess _ought_ to engage attention; and that
their talents will command respect, or else it will be the fault of the
people.

Men go into business in the face of a possibility of failure through
uncontrollable circumstances; not in defiance of an ascertainable,
insufferable incompetency. They toil on, accepting adversity with such
equanimity as God gives them, so long as they are permitted to believe
that their misfortunes are not chargeable upon their incapacity or
self-indulgence. But when it is made apparent that they are not in their
proper sphere, they think it no shame to say so, to withdraw, and
to apply their energies to something suited to their tastes and
capabilities. And it should be with the ministry; but as things now are,
with the conceptions of the ministry now entertained, pride interposes
to forbid the rectification of the most serious mistakes. It is a
question of dignity and of scholarship; whereas it should be a question
of love to God and man, and of real ability and conscious power to bring
them together,--to reconcile man to God.

Our age is an age of great devotion to secular affairs,--of men who are
great in the conduct of such affairs,--in every department in life. To
counterbalance this, our ministry must be filled with an equally earnest
devotion to God and salvation. In real ability our ministers ought to be
not a whit behind. But ability is not necessarily scholarship; though it
may, and as far as possible should, include that, and a great deal more.
Let it be fully understood, once for all, that we have no disparaging
remark to make of scholarship; a man must be foolish beyond expression,
who pretends to argue that the highest scholarship is less than a most
important and almost indispensable auxiliary to the minister of Christ.
All our concern in the matter, just here, is, that it shall be fully
understood that piety and real ability make the minister of Christ,
and not scholarship; in the words of Augustine, "the heart makes the
minister";--but we may safely assume that he meant the heart of a really
able man; otherwise we can accord but a qualified respect to this
remark.

The prevailing impression among the ministry appears to be, that the man
who cannot write "an able doctrinal discourse" is but an inferior man,
fit only to preach in an inferior place; and that it would be a great
gain to the Church, if scholarship were only so general that the
standard of the universities could be applied, and only Phi-Beta-Kappa
men allowed to enter the ministry. No doubt, those who incline to this
view are quite honest, and not unkindly in it. But those who think this
grievously misunderstand the necessities of the age in which we live.
Reading men know where to find better reading than can possibly be
furnished by any man who is bound to write two sermons weekly, or
even one sermon a week; and to train any corps of young men in the
expectation that any considerable fraction of them will be able to win
and to maintain a commanding influence in their parishes mainly by the
weekly production of learned discourses is to do them the greatest
injury, by cherishing expectations which never can be realized. Why
do our educated men of other professions so seldom and so reluctantly
contribute to the addresses in our religious assemblies? Precisely
because they understand the difficulty of meeting the popular
expectation which is created by the prevailing theory; a theory which
demands that sermons, and not only that sermons, but also that all
religious addresses, should be chiefly characterized as learned, acute,
scholastic even. An Irish preacher is reported in an Edinburgh paper as
saying lately, that "he had been led to think of his own preaching and
of that of his brethren. He saw very few sermons in the New Testament
shaped after the forms and fashion in which they had been accustomed to
shape theirs. He was not aware of a sermon there, in which they had
a little motto selected, upon which a disquisition upon a particular
subject was hung. The sort of sermons which the people in his locality
were desirous to hear were sermons delivered on a large portion of the
Word of God, carrying through the ideas as the Spirit of God had done."
And it is, in part at least, because of the prevailing disregard of this
most reasonable desire, that parishes so soon weary of their ministers.

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