目录
帕斯顿家族和乔叟
The Pastons and Chaucer 1
不懂希腊文学
On Not Knowing Greek. 22
伊丽莎白时代的杂物间
The Elizabethan Lumber Room.. 38
伊丽莎白时代的戏剧札记
Notes on an Elizabethan Play. 47
蒙田
Montaigne. 57
纽卡斯尔公爵夫人
The Duchess of Newcastle. 68
漫谈伊夫林
Rambling Round Evelyn. 78
笛福
Defoe87
艾迪生
Addison. 96
无名人的生活
The Lives of the Obscure. 107
简奥斯丁
Jane Austen. 124
现代小说
Modern Fiction. 137
《简爱》与《呼啸山庄》
Jane Eyre And Wuthering Heights. 147
乔治艾略特
George Eliot 155
俄国小说的观点
The Russian Point of View.. 166
摘记
Outlines177
保护人与番红花
The Patron and the Crocus. 199
现代散文
The Modern Essay. 204
约瑟夫康拉德
Joseph Conrad. 217
当代文学作品印象
How it Strikes a Contemporary. 225
伊丽莎白时代的杂物间The Elizabethan Lumber Room《哈克卢特》不像一本书，而像一个装满了宝石、羊毛、航海工具的杂物间，那些价值连城或一文不值的零碎物件是无数次远航以及在伊丽莎白女王①的领土上探索的成果。这些探险由西方国家的年轻人掌握，由女王亲自拨付资金。很多人从此再也没有回来，淘金故事在西方国家盛行。这些冒险都成为了戏剧。我们发现伊丽莎白时代的所有文学作品都金银遍地，里面还提到了美洲，那里象征着灵魂里的未知领域。远航的杂物间刺激了英国最伟大的诗歌时代，但却对英国散文没起多大作用，散文作家被自己奢华的装饰物绊倒。西德尼②大胆而精巧地将语言塑造成自己喜欢的样子，堆积罗列散文内容，无法灵活地表现思想的变幻莫测。为了使随笔完美，舞台原则和自觉意识是必需的，最好的伊丽莎白时代的散文只能在戏剧中找到。但舞台的公开性却阻止了对自我意识的思考，这到了罕见的天才托马斯布朗③那里才得到了合适的表达。他有极为强烈的自我中心感，是第一个将人与人的接触转向孤独生命的人。带着敬畏和满足，他记录下了对自身才华和成就的探索过程，是第一个传记作家。他的幻想如此广泛，让我们得以漫步在世上最好的杂物间里。 ? hese magnificent volumes are not often, perhaps, read through. Part of their charm consists in the fact that Hakluyt is not so much a book as a great bundle of commodities loosely tied together, an emporium, a lumber room strewn with ancient sacks, obsolete nautical instruments, huge bales of wool, and little bags of rubies and emeralds. One is for ever untying this packet here, sampling that heap over there, wiping the dust off some vast map of the world, and sitting down in semi-darkness to snuff the strange smells of silks and leathers and ambergris, while outside tumble the huge waves of the uncharted Elizabethan sea.For this jumble of seeds, silks, unicorns horns, elephants teeth, wool, common stones, turbans, and bars of gold, these odds and ends of priceless value and complete worthlessness, were the fruit of innumerable voyages, traffics, and discoveries to unknown lands in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. The expeditions were manned by apt young men from the West country, and financed in part by the great Queen herself. The ships, says Froude, were no bigger than modern yachts. There in the river by Greenwich the fleet lay gathered, close to the Palace. The Privy council looked out of the windows of the court . . . the ships thereupon discharge their ordnance . . . and the mariners they shouted in such sort that the sky rang again with the noise thereof. Then, as the ships swung down the tide, one sailor after another walked the hatches, climbed the shrouds, stood upon the mainyards to wave his friends a last farewell. Many would come back no more. For directly England and the coast of France were beneath the horizon, the ships sailed into the unfamiliar; the air had its voices, the sea its lions and serpents, its evaporations of fire and tumultuous whirlpools. But God too was very close; the clouds but sparely hid the divinity Himself; the limbs of Satan were almost visible. Familiarly the English sailors pitted their God against the God of the Turks, who can speak never a word for Turk, much less can he help them in such an extremity. . . . But howsoever their God behaved himself, our God showed himself a God indeed. . . . God was as near by sea as by land, said Sir Humfrey Gilbert, riding through the storm. Suddenly one light disappeared; Sir Humfrey Gilbert had gone beneath the waves; when morning came, they sought his ship in vain. Sir Hugh Willoughby sailed to discover the North-West Passage and made no return. The Earl of Cumberlands men, hung up by adverse winds off the coast of Cornwall for a fortnight, licked the muddy water off the deck in agony. And sometimes a ragged and worn-out man came knocking at the door of an English country house and claimed to be the boy who had left it years ago to sail the seas. Sir William his father, and my lady his mother knew him not to be their son, until they found a secret mark, which was a wart upon one of his knees. But he had with him a black stone, veined with gold, or an ivory tusk, or a silver ingot, and urged on the village youth with talk of gold strewn over the land as stones are strewn in the fields of England. One expedition might fail, but what if the passage to the fabled land of uncounted riches lay only a little farther up the coast? What if the known world was only the prelude to some more splendid panorama? When, after the long voyage, the ships dropped anchor in the great river of the Plate and the men went exploring through the undulating lands, startling grazing herds of deer, seeing the limbs of savages between the trees, they filled their pockets with pebbles that might be emeralds or sand that might be gold; or sometimes, rounding a headland, they saw, far off, a string of savages slowly descending to the beach bearing on their heads and linking their shoulders together with heavy burdens for the Spanish King.These are the fine stories used effectively all through the West country to decoy the apt young men lounging by the harbour-side to leave their nets and fish for gold. But the voyagers were sober merchants into the bargain, citizens with the good of English trade and the welfare of English work-people at heart. The captains are reminded how necessary it is to find a market abroad for English wool; to discover the herb from which blue dyes are made; above all to make inquiry as to the methods of producing oil, since all attempts to make it from radish seed have failed. They are reminded of the misery of the English poor, whose crimes, brought about by poverty, make them daily consumed by the gallows. They are reminded how the soil of England had been enriched by the discoveries of travellers in the past; how Dr. Linaker brought seeds of the damask rose and tulipas, and how beasts and plants and herbs, without which our life were to be said barbarous, have all come to England gradually from abroad. In search of markets and of goods, of the immortal fame success would bring them, the apt young men set sail for the North, and were left, a little company of isolated Englishmen surrounded by snow and the huts of savages, to make what bargains they could and pick up what knowledge they might before the ships returned in the summer to fetch them home again. There they endured, an isolated company, burning on the rim of the dark. One of them, carrying a charter from his company in London, went inland as far as Moscow, and there saw the Emperor sitting in his chair of estate with his crown on his head, and a staff of goldsmiths work in his left hand. All the ceremony that he saw is carefully written out, and the sight upon which the English merchant first set eyes has the brilliancy of a Roman vase dug up and stood for a moment in the sun, until, exposed to the air, seen by millions of eyes, it dulls and crumbles away. There, all these centuries, on the outskirts of the world, the glories of Moscow, the glories of Constantinople have flowered unseen. The Englishman was bravely dressed for the occasion, led three fair mastiffs in coats of red cloth, and carried a letter from Elizabeth the paper whereof did smell most fragrantly of camphor and ambergris, and the ink of perfect musk. And sometimes, since trophies from the amazing new world were eagerly awaited at home, together with unicorns horns and lumps of ambergris and the fine stories of the engendering of whales and debates of elephants and dragons whose blood, mixed, congealed into vermilion, a living sample would be sent, a live savage caught somewhere off the coast of Labrador, taken to England, and shown about like a wild beast. Next year they brought him back, and took a woman savage on board to keep him company. When they saw each other they blushed; they blushed profoundly, but the sailors, though they noted it, knew not why. Later the two savages set up house together on board ship, she attending to his wants, he nursing her in sickness. But, as the sailors noted again, the savages lived together in perfect chastity.All this, the new words, the new ideas, the waves, the savages, the adventures, found their way naturally into the plays which were being acted on the banks of the Thames. There was an audience quick to seize upon the coloured and the high-sounding; to associate thosefrigates bottomd with rich Sethin planks,Topt with the lofty firs of Lebanon,with the adventures of their own sons and brothers abroad. The Verneys, for example, had a wild boy who had gone as pirate, turned Turk, and died out there, sending back to Claydon to be kept as relics of him some silk, a turban, and a pilgrims staff. A gulf lay between the spartan domestic housecraft of the Paston women and the refined tastes of the Elizabethan Court ladies, who, grown old, says Harrison, spent their time reading histories, or writing volumes of their own, or translating of other mens into our English and Latin tongue, while the younger ladies played the lute and the citharne and spent their leisure in the enjoyment of music. Thus, with singing and with music, springs into existence the characteristic Elizabethan extravagance; the dolphins and lavoltas of Greene; the hyperbole, more surprising in a writer so terse and muscular, of Ben Jonson. Thus we find the whole of Elizabethan literature strewn with gold and silver; with talk of Guianas rarities, and references to that America O my America! my new-found-land which was not merely a land on the map, but symbolised the unknown territories of the soul. So, over the water, the imagination of Montaigne brooded in fascination upon savages, cannibals, society, and government.But the mention of Montaigne suggests that though the influence of the sea and the voyages, of the lumber room crammed with sea beasts and horns and ivory and old maps and nautical instruments, helpd to inspire the greatest age of English poetry, its effects were by no means so beneficial upon English prose. Rhyme and metre helpd the poets to keep the tumult of their perceptions in order. But the prose writer, without these restrictions, accumulated clauses, petered out in interminable catalogues, tripped and stumbled over the convolutions of his own rich draperies. How little Elizabethan prose was fit for its office, how exquisitely French prose was already adapted, can be seen by comparing a passage from Sidneys Defense of Poesie with one from Montaignes Essays.He beginneth not with obscure definitions, which must blur the margent with interpretations, and load the memory with doubtfulness： but he cometh to you with words set in delightful proportion, either accompanied with, or prepared for the well enchanting Skill of Music, and with a tale forsooth he cometh unto you, with a tale which holdeth children from play, and old men from the Chimney corner; and pretending no more, doth intend the winning of the mind from wickedness to virtue; even as the child is often brought to take most wholesome things by hiding them in such other as have a pleasant taste： which if one should begin to tell them the nature of the Alo?s or Rhubarbarum they should receive, would sooner take their physic at their ears than at their mouth, so is it in men most of which are childish in the best things, till they be cradled in their graves glad they will be to hear the tales of Hercules. . . .And so it runs on for seventy-six words more. Sidneys prose is an uninterrupted monologue, with sudden flashes of felicity and splendid phrases, which lends itself to lamentations and moralities, to long accumulations and catalogues, but is never quick, never colloquial, unable to grasp a thought closely and firmly, or to adapt itself flexibly and exactly to the chops and changes of the mind. Compared with this, Montaigne is master of an instrument which knows its own powers and limitations, and is capable of insinuating itself into crannies and crevices which poetry can never reach; capable of cadences different but no less beautiful; of subtleties and intensities which Elizabethan prose entirely ignores. He is considering the way in which certain of the ancients met death：. . . ils lont faicte couler et glisser parmy la laschet de leurs occupations accoustumes entre des garses et bons compaignons; nul propos de consolation, nulle mention de testament, nulle affectation ambitieuse de constance, nul discours de leur condition future; mais entre les jeux, les festins, facecies, entretiens communs et populaires, et la musique, et des vers amoureux.An age seems to separate Sidney from Montaigne. The English compared with the French are as boys compared with men.But the Elizabethan prose writers, if they have the formlessness of youth, have, too, its freshness and audacity. In the same essay Sidney shapes language, masterfully and easily, to his liking; freely and naturally reaches his hand for a metaphor. To bring this prose to perfection and Drydens prose is very near perfection only the discipline of the stage was necessary and the growth of self-consciousness. It is in the plays, and especially in the comic passages of the plays, that the finest Elizabethan prose is to be found. The stage was the nursery where prose learnt to find its feet. For on the stage people had to meet, to quip and crank, to suffer interruptions, to talk of ordinary things.Cler. A pox of her autumnal face, her pieced beauty! theres no man can be admitted till she be ready now-a-days; till she has painted, and perfumed, and washed, and scoured, but the boy here; and him she wipes her oiled lips upon, like a sponge. I have made a song I pray thee hear it on the subject.Still to be neat, still to be drest, True. And I am clearly on the other side： I love a good dressing before any beauty o the world. O, a woman is then like a delicate garden; nor is there one kind of it; she may vary every hour; take often counsel of her glass, and choose the best. If she have good ears, show them; good hair, lay it out; good legs, wear short clothes; a good hand, discover it often： practise any art to mend breath, cleanse teeth, repair eyebrows; paint and profess it.So the talk runs in Ben Jonsons Silent Woman, knocked into shape by interruptions, sharpened by collisions, and never allowed to settle into stagnancy or swell into turbidity. But the publicity of the stage and the perpetual presence of a second person were hostile to that growing consciousness of ones self, that brooding in solitude over the mysteries of the soul, which, as the years went by, sought expression and found a champion in the sublime genius of Sir Thomas Browne. His immense egotism has paved the way for all psychological novelists, auto-biographers, confession-mongers, and dealers in the curious shades of our private life. He it was who first turned from the contacts of men with men to their lonely life within. The world that I regard is myself; it is the microcosm of my own frame that I cast mine eye on; for the other I use it but like my globe, and turn it round sometimes for my recreation. All was mystery and darkness as the first explorer walked the catacombs swinging his lanthorn. I feel sometimes a hell within myself; Lucifer keeps his court in my breast; Legion is revived in me. In these solitudes there were no guides and no companions. I am in the dark to all the world, and my nearest friends behold me but in a cloud. The strangest thoughts and imaginings have play with him as he goes about his work, outwardly the most sober of mankind and esteemed the greatest physician in Norwich. He has wished for death. He has doubted all things. What if we are asleep in this world and the conceits of life are as mere dreams? The tavern music, the Ave Mary bell, the broken pot that the workman has dug out of the field at the sight and sound of them he stops dead, as if transfixed by the astonishing vista that opens before his imagination. We carry with us the wonders we seek without us; there is all Africa and her prodigies in us. A halo of wonder encircles everything that he sees; he turns his light gradually upon the flowers and insects and grasses at his feet so as to disturb nothing in the mysterious processes of their existence. With the same awe, mixed with a sublime complacency, he records the discovery of his own qualities and attainments. He was charitable and brave and averse from nothing. He was full of feeling for others and merciless upon himself. For my conversation, it is like the suns, with all men, and with a friendly aspect to good and bad. He knows six languages, the laws, the customs and policies of several states, the names of all the constellations and most of the plants of his country, and yet, so sweeping is his imagination, so large the horizon in which he sees this little figure walking that methinks I do not know so many as when I did but know a hundred, and had scarcely ever simpled further than Cheapside.He is the first of the autobiographers. Swooping and soaring at the highest altitudes, he stoops suddenly with loving particularity upon the details of his own body. His height was moderate, he tells us, his eyes large and luminous; his skin dark but constantly suffused with blushes. He dressed very plainly. He seldom laughed. He collected coins, kept maggots in boxes, dissected the lungs of frogs, braved the stench of the spermaceti whale, tolerated Jews, had a good word for the deformity of the toad, and combined a scientific and sceptical attitude towards most things with an unfortunate belief in witches. In short, as we say when we cannot help laughing at the oddities of people we admire most, he was a character, and the first to make us feel that the most sublime speculations of the human imagination are issued from a particular man, whom we can love. In the midst of the solemnities of the Urn Burial we smile when he remarks that afflictions induce callosities. The smile broadens to laughter as we mouth out the splendid pomposities, the astonishing conjectures of the Religio Medici. Whatever he writes is stamped with his own idiosyncrasy, and we first become conscious of impurities which hereafter stain literature with so many freakish colours that, however hard we try, it is difficult to be certain whether we are looking at a man or his writing. Now we are in the presence of sublime imagination; now rambling through one of the finest lumber rooms in the world a chamber stuffed from floor to ceiling with ivory, old iron, broken pots, urns, unicorns horns, and magic glasses full of emerald lights and blue mystery.① 伊丽莎白女王：即伊丽莎白一世（Elizabeth I，1533－1603），都铎王朝最后一位君主，于1558年11月到1603年3月在位，其统治时期被称为黄金时代。② 西德尼（Philip Sidney，15541586），伊丽莎白一世时期的廷臣、政治家、诗人和学者。代表作有《爱星者和星星》《阿卡狄亚》《诗辩》等。③ 托马斯布朗（Thomas Browne，16051682），英国医师、作家、哲学家、联想主义心理学家，以博学著名，著述颇丰，涉及文学、医学、宗教等多个方面，代表作有《医生的宗教》《瓮葬》等。??
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The Common ReaderFirst Series
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