酷兔英语
    当前位置:
  1. 首页
  2. 文章
  3. 娱乐英语
  4. 原版小说
  5. 正文

Robert Louis Stevenson-Part17_Alexander H.Japp(1839-1905)_English Literature(文学名著)-第2页

0 收藏 0 分享 0 赞

章节正文
文章总共2页
Your mother's heart, your father's bones;



And, like the mandrake, comes with groans."

The phantastic moralist is supreme, jauntily serious, facetiously



earnest, most gravely funny in the whole series of MORAL EMBLEMS.

"Reader, your soul upraise to see,



In yon fair cut designed by me,

The pauper by the highwayside



Vainly soliciting from pride.

Mark how the Beau with easy air



Contemns the anxious rustic's prayer

And casting a disdainful eye



Goes gaily gallivanting by.

He from the poor averts his head . . .



He will regret it when he's dead."

Now, the man who would trace out step by step and point by point,



clearly and faithfully, the process by which Stevenson worked

himself so far free of this his besetting tendency to moralised



symbolism or allegory into the freer air of life and real

character, would do more to throw light on Stevenson's genius, and



the obstacles he had had to contend with in becoming a novelist

eager to interpret definite times and character, than has yet been



done or even faithfully attempted. This would show at once

Stevenson's wonderful growth and the saving grace and elasticity of



his temperament and genius. Few men who have by force of native

genius gone into allegory or moralised phantasy ever depart out of



that fateful and enchanted region. They are as it were at once

lost and imprisoned in it and kept there as by a spell - the more



they struggle for freedom the more surely is the bewitching charm

laid upon them - they are but like the fly in amber. It was so



with Ludwig Tieck; it was so with Nathaniel Hawthorne; it was so

with our own George MacDonald, whose professedly real pictures of



life are all informed of this phantasy, which spoils them for what

they profess to be, and yet to the discerning cannot disguise what



they really are - the attempts of a mystic poet and phantasy writer

and allegoristic moralist to walk in the ways of Anthony Trollope



or of Mrs Oliphant, and, like a stranger in a new land always

looking back (at least by a side-glance, an averted or half-averted



face which keeps him from seeingsteadily and seeing whole the real

world with which now he is fain to deal), to the country from which



he came.

Stevenson did largely free himself, that is his great achievement -



had he lived, we verily believe, so marked was his progress, he

would have been a great and true realist, a profoundinterpreter of



human life and its tragic laws and wondrous compensations - he

would have shown how to make the full retreat from fairyland



without penalty of too early an escape from it, as was the case

with Thomas the Rymer of Ercildoune, and with one other told of by



him, and proved that to have been a dreamer need not absolutely

close the door to insight into the real world and to art. This



side of the subject, never even glanced at by Mr Henley or Mr

Zangwill or their CONFRERES, yet demands, and will well reward the



closest and most careful attention and thought that can be given to

it.



The parabolic element, with the whimsical humour and turn for

paradoxical inversion, comes out fully in such a work as DR JEKYLL



AND MR HYDE. There his humour gives body to his fancy, and reality

to the half-whimsical forms in which he embodies the results of



deep and earnest speculations on human nature and motive. But even

when he is professedly concerned with incident and adventure



merely, he manages to communicate to his pages some touch of

universality, as of unconscious parable or allegory, so that the



reader feels now and then as though some thought, or motive, or

aspiration, or weakness of his own were being there cunningly



unveiled or presented; and not seldom you feel he has also unveiled

and presented some of yours, secret and unacknowledged too.






文章总共2页
文章标签:名著  

章节正文
Copyright © 2023 Qeto All rights reserved.
商务合作 | 联系我们 | 关于我们 | 版权声明 | 隐私条款 | 如果智培

京ICP备05059198号-1 京公网安备 11011202003401号