John W Campbell - "The Black Star Passes"

F. B. Vaux - "Domestic pleasures"

Mary Eales - "Mrs. Mary Eales's receipts. (1733)"

Ernest Belfort Bax - "German Culture Past and Present"

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




In the family of nations France is the child of illusions, and excites
the sympathy of the magnanimous because her destinies have been marred
through the errors of the imagination rather than of the heart.
Government, religion, and society--the three great elements of civil
life--have nowhere been so modified by the dominion of fancy over fact.
Take the history of French republicanism, of Quietism, of court and
literary circles; what perspicuity in the expression, and vagueness
in the realization of ideas! In each a mania to fascinate, in none a
thorough basis of truth; abundance of talent, but no faith; gayety,
gallantry, wit, devotion, dreams, and epigrams in perfection, without
the solid foundation of principles and the efficient development in
practice, either of polity, a social system, or religious belief,--the
theory and the sentiment of each being at the same time luxuriant,
attractive, and prolific.

The popular writers are eloquent in abstractions, but each seems
inspired by a thorough egotism. Descartes, their philosopher, drew all
his inferences from consciousness; Madame de Sevigne, the epistolary
queen, had for her central motive of all speculation and gossip the love
of her daughter; Madame Guyon eliminated her tenets from the ecstasy of
self-love; Rochefoucauld derived a set of philosophical maxims from the
lessons of mere worldly disappointment; Calvin sought to reform society
through the stern bigotry of a private creed; La Bruyere elaborated
generic characters from the acute, but narrow observation of artificial
society; Boileau established a classical standard of criticism suggested
by personal taste, which ignored the progress of the human mind.

The redeeming grace of the nation is to be found in its wholesome sense
of the enjoyable and the available in ordinary life, in its freedom
from the discontent which elsewhere is born of avarice and unmitigated
materialism. The love of pleasing, the influence of women, and a
frivolous temper everywhere and on all occasions signalize them. "Why,
people laugh at everything here!" naively exclaimed the young Duchess of
Burgundy, on her arrival at the French court.

The amount of commodities taken by French people on a journey, and the
cool self-satisfaction with which they are appropriated as occasion
demands, give a stranger the most vivid idea of sensual egotism. The
_pate_, the long roll of bread, the sour wine, the lap-dog, the snuff,
and the night-cap, which transform the car or carriage into a refectory
and boudoir, with the chatter, snoring, and shifting of legs, make an
interior scene for the novice, especially on a night-jaunt, compared to
which the humblest of Dutch pictures are refined and elegant.

The intrinsic diversity and the national relations between the French
and English are curiously illustrated by their respective history and
literature. Compare, for instance, the plays of Shakspeare, which
dramatize the long wars of the early kings, with the account given in
the journals of the reception of Victoria at Paris and of Louis Napoleon
in London; imagine the royal salutation and the official recognition of
the once anathematized Napoleon dynasty; General Bonaparte becomes in
his tomb Napoleon I. No wonder "Punch" affirmed that the statue of Pitt
shook its bronze head and the bones of Castlereagh stirred in protest.

"The English," says a celebrated writer, "like ancient medals, kept more
apart, preserve the first sharpness which the fair hand of Nature has
given them; they are not so pleasant to feel, but, in return, the legend
is so visible, that, at the first look, you can see whose image and
superscription they bear." This is a delicate way of setting forth
the superior honesty and bluntness and the inferior smoothness and
assimilating instinct of the Anglo-Saxon,--a vital difference, which
no alliance or intercourse with his Gallic neighbors can essentially
change.

A century ago there were few better tests of popular sentiment in
England than the plays in vogue. As indications of the state of the
public mind, they were what the ballads are to earlier times, and the
daily press is to our own,--generalized casual, but emphatic proofs of
the opinions, prejudices, and fancies of the hour. Now a large English
colony is domesticated in France; it is but a few hours' trip from
London to Paris; newspapers and the telegraph in both capitals make
almost simultaneous announcements of news; the soldiers of the two
nations fight side by side; the French shopman declares on his sign that
English is spoken within; the "Times," porter, and tea are obtainable
commodities in Paris; and _fraternite_ is the watchword at Dover and
Calais. Yet the normal idea which obtains in the conservative brain of a
genuine _Anglais_, though doubtless expanded and modified by intercourse
and treaties, may be found still in that once popular drama, Foote's
"Englishman in Paris." "A Frenchman," says one of the characters, "is a
fop. Their taste is trifling, and their politeness pride. What the deuse
brings you to Paris, then? Where's the use? It gives Englishmen a true
relish for their own domestic happiness, a proper veneration for their
national liberties, and an honor for the extended generous commerce of
their country. The men there are all puppies, the women painted dolls."
Monsieur Ragout and Monsieur Rosbif bandy words; the former is said to
"look as if he had not had a piece of beef or pudding in his paunch for
twenty years, and had lived wholly on frogs,"--and the latter pines to
leap a five-barred gate, and is afraid of being entrapped by "a rich
she-Papist." His fair countrywoman is invited by a French marquis to
marry him, with this programme,--"A perpetual residence in this paradise
of pleasures; to be the object of universal adoration; to say what you
please,--go where you will,--do what you like,--form fashions,--hate
your husband, and let him see it,--indulge your gallant,--run in debt,
and oblige the poor devil to pay it."

As a pendant, take the description of one of the last French novels:--"A
Paris tout s'oublie, tout se pardonne. Par convenance, par decence,
quelquefois par crainte, on s'absente, ou fait un entr'acte: puis le
rideau se releve pour le spectacle de nouvelles fautes et de nouvelles
folies; toute la question est de savoir s'y prendre."

Comedy is native to French genius and appreciation; it follows the
changes of social life with marvellous celerity; it is the best school
of the French language; and is refined and subdivided, as an art, both
in degree and kind, in France more than in any other country. The
prolific authors in this department, and the variety and richness of
invention they display, as well as the permanent attraction of the Comic
Muse, are striking peculiarities of the French theatre. No capital
affords the material and the audience requisite for such triumphs like
Paris; and there is always a play of this kind in vogue there, wherein
novelty of combination, significance of dialogue, and artistic
felicities quite unrivalled elsewhere, are exhibited.

It is quite the reverse with the serious drama. In England this is a
form of literature which goes nearest to the normal facts and conditions
of human nature; it teaches the highest and deepest lessons, wins the
most profound sympathy, and is remarkable and interesting through its
subtile and comprehensive truth to Nature: whereas in France the masters
of tragic art are but skilful reproducers of the classical drama. French
tragedy is essentially artificial, grafted on the conventionalities of
a distant age. It gives scope either to mere elocutionary art or
melodramatic invention,--not to the universal and existing passions.
There is but a slender opportunity to identify our sympathies--those of
modern civilization--with what is going on. Figures in Roman togas
or Grecian mantles rehearse the sentiments of fatalism, the creed of
ancient mythology, or Gallic rhetoric in a classic dress; and these
disguises so envelope the love, ambition, despair, hate, or patriotism,
that we are always conscious of the theatrical, and it requires the
extraordinary gifts of a Rachel to enlist other than artistic interest.

The French have manuals for breathing and composing the features
to secure artistic effects; they offer academic prizes for every
conceivable achievement; their very lamp-posts are designed with taste;
a huckster in the street will exhibit dramatic tact and wonderful
mechanical dexterity. "Quand il parait un homme de genie en France,"
says Madame de Stael, "dans quelque carriere que ce soit, il atteint
presque toujours a un degre de perfection sans exemple; car il reunit
l'audace qui fait sortir de la route commune au tact du bon gout." And
yet in vast political interests they are victims,--in the more earnest
developments of the soul, children. A new artificial lake in the Bois de
Boulogne, a grand military reception, news of a victory in some distant
corner of the globe, the distribution of eagles to brave survivors,--in
a word, an appeal to the love of amusement, of display, and of
glory,--quiets the murmur about to rise against interference with human
rights or usurpation of the national will. Political interests of the
gravest character are treated with flippancy: one writer calls the
formation of a new government Talleyrand's table of whist; and another
casually observes that "_tous les gouvernements nouveaux ont leur lune
de miel_."

That great principle of the division of labor, which the English carry
into mechanical and commercial affairs, the French also apply to the
economy of life and to Art; but, as these latter interests are more
spontaneous and unlimited, the result is often a perfection in detail,
and a like deficiency in general effect. Thus, there are schools of
painting in France more distinct and apart than exist elsewhere; usually
the followers of such are distinguished for excellence in the mechanical
aptitudes of their vocation; the figure is admirably drawn, the costume
rightly disposed, and sometimes the degree of finish quite marvellous;
but, usually, this superiority is attained at the expense of the
sentiment of the picture. French historic Art, like French life, is
apt to be extravagant and melodramatic, or over-refined in unimportant
particulars; it often lacks moral harmony,--the grand, simple, true
reflection of Nature in its nicety. Delaroche, who, of all French
painters, rose most above the adventitious, and gave himself to the soul
of Art, to pure expression, was, for this very reason, thought by his
brother artists to be cold and unattractive. There is one sphere,
however, where this exclusiveness of style and partition of labor are
productive of the most felicitous results: namely, the minor drama. In
England and America the same theatre exhibits opera, melodrama, tragedy,
comedy, rope-dancing, and legerdemain; but in Paris, each branch and
element of histrionic art has its separate temple, its special corps of
actors and authors, nay, its particular class of subjects; hence their
unrivalled perfection. Ingenuity, science, and Art are concentrated by
thus assigning free and individual scope to the dramatic niceties and
phases of life, of history, of genius, and of society. At the Opera
Comique you find one kind of musical creation; at the Italiens the
lyrical drama of Southern Europe alone; at the Varietes a unique order
of comic dialogue; and at the Porte St. Martin yet another species of
play. One theatre gives back the identical tone of existing society and
current events; another deals with the classical ideas of the past.
Satire and song, the horrible and the brilliant, the graceful and the
highly artistic, pictorial, elocutionary, pantomimic, tragic, vocal,
statuesque, the past and present, all the elements of Art and of life,
find representation in the plot, the language, the sentiment, the
costume, the music, and the scenery of the many Parisian theatres.

Yet how much of this superiority is fugitive! how little in the whole
dramatic development takes permanent hold upon popular sympathy! Much
of its significance is purely local, and of its interest altogether
temporary. Scholars and the higher classes can talk eloquently of
Corneille and Racine; the beaux and _spirituelle_ women of the day can
repeat and enjoy the last hit of Scribe, or the new _bon-mot_ of
the theatre: but contrast these results with the national love and
appreciation of Shakspeare,--with the permanent reflection of Spanish
life in Lope de Vega,--the patriotic aspirations which the young Italian
broods over in the tragedies of Alfieri. The grace of movement, the
triumph of tact and ingenuity, the devotion to conventionalism, either
pedantry or the genius of the hour, also rules the drama in Paris. With
all its brilliancy, entertainment, grace, wit, and popularity,--there
exists not a permanently vital and universally recognized type of this
greatest department of literature, familiar and endeared alike to
peasant and peer, a representative of humanity for all time,--like the
bard around whose name and words cluster the Anglo-Saxon hearts and
intelligence from generation to generation.

But nowhere do life and the drama so trench upon each other; nowhere is
every incident of experience so dramatic. Miss H.M. Williams told the
poet Rogers that she had seen "men and women, waiting for admission at
the door of the theatre, suddenly leave their station, on the passing of
a set of wretches going to be guillotined, and then, having ascertained
that none of their relations or friends were among them, very
unconcernedly return to the door of the theatre." A child is born at the
Opera Comique during the performance, and it is instantly made an event
of sympathy and effect by the audience; a subscription is raised, the
child named for the dramatic heroine of the moment, and the fortunate
mother sent home in a carriage, amid the plaudits of the crowd. You are
listening to a play; and a copy of the "Entr'acte" is thrust into your
hand, containing a minute account of the death of a statesman two
squares off whose name fills pages of history, or a battle in the East,
where some officer whom you met two months before on the Boulevard has
won immortal fame by prodigies of valor. So do the actualities and the
pastimes, the real and the imaginary drama, miraculously interfuse at
Paris; the comedy of life is patent there, and often the spectator
exclaims, "_Arlequin avait bien arrange les choses, mais Colombine
derange tout!_"

The Parisian females are "unexceptionably shod,"--but the agricultural
instruments now in use in the rural districts of France are of a form
and mechanism which, to a Yankee farmer, would seem antediluvian; the
cooks, gardeners, and other working-people, have annually the most
graceful festivals,--but the traveller sees in the fields women so
bronzed and wrinkled by toil and exposure that their sex is hardly to be
recognized. When the Gothamite passes along Pearl or Broad Street,
he beholds the daily spectacle of unemployed carmen reading
newspapers;--there may be said to be no such thing as popular literature
in France; mental recreation, such as the German and Scotch peasantry
enjoy, is unknown there. The Art and letters of the kingdom flourished
in her court and were cultivated as an aristocratic element for so long
a period, that neither has become domesticated among the lower classes;
we find in them the sentiment of military glory, of religion in its
superstitious phase, of music perhaps, of rustic festivity,--but not the
enjoyments which spring from or are associated with thought and poetic
sympathies such as national writers like Burns inspired. An exception
comparatively recent may be found in the popular appreciation of
Beranger and Souvestre.

There is not a natural object too beautiful or an occasion too solemn
to arrest the French tendency to the theatrical. Even one of their most
ardent eulogists remarks,--"All that can be said against the French
sublime is this,--that the grandeur is more in the word than in the
thing; the French expression professes more than it performs"; and old
Montaigne declares that "lying is not a vice among the French, _but a
way of speaking_." Both observations admit too much; and indicate an
habitual departure from Nature and simplicity as a national trait.
Who but Frenchmen ever delighted in reducing to artificial shapes the
graceful forms of vegetable life, or can so far lay aside the sentiment
of grief as to engage in rhetorical panegyrics over the fresh graves
of departed friends? Compare the high dead wall with its range of
flower-pots, the porches undecked by woodbines or jessamine, the formal
paths, the proximate kitchen, stables, and ungarnished _salon_ of
a French villa, with the hedges, meadows, woodlands, and trellised
eglantine of an English country-house; and a glance assures us that
to the former nation the country is a _dernier ressort_, and not an
endeared seclusion. Yet they romance, in their way, on rural subjects:
"_A la campagne_," says one of their poets, "_ou chaque feuille qui
tombe est une elegie toute faite_." Through an avenue of scraggy poplars
we approach a dilapidated _chateau_, whose owner is playing dominoes
at the cafe of the nearest provincial town, or exhausting the sparse
revenues of the estate at the theatres, roulette-tables, or balls of
Paris. People leave these for a rural vicinage only to economize, to
hide chagrin, or to die. So recognized is this indifference to Nature
and inaptitude for rural life in France, that, when we desire to
express the opposite of natural tastes, we habitually use the word
"Frenchified." The idea which a Parisian has of a tree is that of a
convenient appendage to a lamp. The traveller never sees artificial
light reflected from green leaves, without thinking of his evening
promenades in the French capital, or a dance in the groves of
Montmorency. The old verbal tyranny of the French Academy, the
painted wreaths sold at cemetery-gates, the colored plates of fashions,
powdered hair, and rouged cheeks, typify and illustrate this irreverent
ambition to pervert Nature and create artificial effects; they are but
so many forms of the theatrical instinct, and proofs of the ascendency
of meretricious taste. It is this want of loyalty to Nature, and
insensibility to her unadulterated charms, which constitute the real
barrier between the Gallic mind and that of England and Italy, and
which explain the fervent protest of such men as Alfieri and Coleridge.
Simplicity and earnestness are the normal traits of efficient character,
whether developed in action or Art, in sentiment or reflection; and
manufactured verse, vegetation, and complexions indicate a faith in
appearances and a divorce from reality, which, in political interests,
tend to compromise, to theory, and to acquiescence in a military
_regime_ and an embellished absolutism.

It is this incompleteness, this comparative untruth, that gives rise to
the dissatisfaction we feel in the last analysis of French character.
It is delusive. The promise of beauty held out by external taste is
unfulfilled; the fascination of manner bears a vastly undue proportion
to the substantial kindness and trust which that immediate charm
suggests. "Just Heaven!" exclaims Yorick, "for what wise reasons hast
thou ordered it, that beggary and urbanity, which are at such variance
in other countries, should find a way to be at unity in this?" The
bearing of an Englishman seldom awakens expectation of courtesy
or entertainment; yet, if vouchsafed, how to be relied on is the
friendship! how generous the hospitality! The urbane salutation with
which a Frenchman greets the female passenger, as she enters a public
conveyance, is not followed by the offer of his seat or a slice of his
reeking _pate_,--while the roughest backwoodsman in America, who never
touched his hat or inclined his body to a stranger, will guard a
woman from insult, and incommode himself to promote her comfort, with
respectful alacrity. It is so in literature. How often we eagerly follow
the clear exposition of a subject in the pages of a French author, to
reach an impotent conclusion! or suffer our sympathies to be enlisted by
the admirable description of an interior or a character in one of their
novels, to find the plot which embodies them an absurd melodrama!
Evanescence is the law of Parisian felicities,--selfishness the
background of French politeness,--sociability flourishes in an inverse
ratio to attachment; we become skeptical almost in proportion as we are
attracted. If we ask the way, we are graciously directed; but if we
demand the least sacrifice, we must accept volubility for service. Thus
the perpetual flowering in manners, in philosophy, in politics, and in
economy, is rarely accompanied by fruit in either. To enjoy Paris, we
must cease to be in earnest;--to pass the time, and not to wrest from it
a blessing or a triumph, is the main object. The badges, the gardens,
the smiles, the agreeable phrase, the keen repartee, the tempting dish,
the ingenious _vaudeville_, the pretty foot, the elegant chair and
becoming curtain, the extravagant gesture, the pointed epigram or
alluring formula, must be taken as so many agreeabilities,--not for
things performed, but imaginatively promised. The folly of war has been
demonstrated to the entire sense of mankind; at best, it is now deemed
a painful necessity; yet the most serious phase of life in France is
military. Depth and refinement of feeling are lonely growths, and can no
more spring up in a gregarious and festal life than trees in quicksands;
citizenship is based on consistent acts, not on verbosity; and
brilliant accompaniments never reconcile strong hearts to the loss of
independence, which some English author has acutely declared the first
essential of a gentleman. The civilization of France is an artistic and
scientific materialism; the spiritual element is wanting. Paris is the
theatre of nations; we must regard it as a continuous spectacle, a
boundless museum, a place of diversion, of study,--not of faith, the
deepest want and most sacred birthright of humanity.

The want of directness, the absence of candor, the non-recognition of
truth in its broad and deep sense, is, indeed, a characteristic phase
of life, of expression, and of manners in France. A lover of his nation
confesses that even in "_galantes aventures l'esprit prenait la place
du coeur, la fantaisie celle du sentiment_." Voltaire's creed was, that
"_le mensonge n'est un vice que quand il fait du mal; c'est une grande
vertu quand il fait du bien_." "_L'exageration_" says De Maistre, "_est
le mensonge des honnetes gens_."

In every aspect the histrionic prevails,--by facility of association and
colloquial aptitude in the common intercourse of life,--by the inventive
element in dress, furniture, and material arrangements, plastic to the
caprice of taste and ingenuity,--by the habitudes of out-of-door life,
giving greater variety and adaptation to manners,--and by a national
temperament, susceptible and demonstrative. The current vocabulary
suggests a perpetual recourse to the casual, a shifting of the
life-scene, a recognition of the temporary and accidental. Such
oft-recurring words as _flaneur_, _liaison_, _badinage_, etc., have no
exact synonymes in other tongues. All that is done, thought, and felt
takes a dramatic expression. Lamartine elaborates a "History of
the Restoration" from two reports,--the one monarchical, the other
republican,--and, by making the facts picturesque and sentimental, wins
countless readers. Comte elaborates a masterly analysis of the sciences,
proclaims a fascinating theory of eras or stages in human development;
but the positive philosophy, of which all this is but the introduction,
to be applied to the individual and society, eludes, at last, direct and
complete application. A popular _savant_ dies, and students drag the
hearse and scatter flowers over the grave; a philosopher lectures, and
immediately his disciples form a school, and advocate his system with
the ardor of partisans; a disappointed soldier commits suicide by
throwing himself from Napoleon's column, while a _grisette_ and her
lover make their exit through a last embrace and the fumes of charcoal;
a wit seeks revenge with a clever repartee instead of his fists or cane.
A lady is the centre of attraction at a reception, and, upon inquiry, we
are gravely informed that the charm lies in the fact, that, though now
fat and more than forty, as well as married to an old noble, in her
youth she was the mistress of a celebrated poet. Notoriety, even when
scandalous, is as good a social distinction as birth, fame, or beauty.
Rousseau wrote a love-story, and sentiment became the rage. An artisan
has a day to spare, and takes his family to a garden or a dance. Human
existence, thus embellished, impulsive, and caricatured, becomes
a continuous melodrama, with an occasional catastrophe induced by
political revolutions. Louis XIV., the most characteristic king France
ever had, is a genuine representative of this theatrical instinct and
development.

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