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Notes on Life and Letters-Part11_JOSEPH CONRAD (1857-1924)_English Literature(文学名著)-第2页

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come to us by way of Moscow--I suppose. It is outlandish. It is

not venerable. It does not belong here. Is it not time to knock



it off its dark shelf with some implementappropriate to its worth

and status? With an old broom handle for instance.



PART II--LIFE

AUTOCRACY AND WAR--1905



From the firing of the first shot on the banks of the Sha-ho, the

fate of the great battle of the Russo-Japanese war hung in the



balance for more than a fortnight. The famous three-day battles,

for which history has reserved the recognition of special pages,



sink into insignificance before the struggles in Manchuria engaging

half a million men on fronts of sixty miles, struggles lasting for



weeks, flaming up fiercely and dying away from sheer exhaustion, to

flame up again in desperate persistence, and end--as we have seen



them end more than once--not from the victor obtaining a crushing

advantage, but through the mortalweariness of the combatants.



We have seen these things, though we have seen them only in the

cold, silent, colourless print of books and newspapers. In



stigmatising the printed word as cold, silent and colourless, I

have no intention of putting a slight upon the fidelity and the



talents of men who have provided us with words to read about the

battles in Manchuria. I only wished to suggest that in the nature



of things, the war in the Far East has been made known to us, so

far, in a grey reflection of its terrible and monotonous phases of



pain, death, sickness; a reflection seen in the perspective of

thousands of miles, in the dim atmosphere of official reticence,



through the veil of inadequate words. Inadequate, I say, because

what had to be reproduced is beyond the common experience of war,



and our imagination, luckily for our peace of mind, has remained a

slumbering faculty, notwithstanding the din of humanitarian talk



and the real progress of humanitarian ideas. Direct vision of the

fact, or the stimulus of a great art, can alone make it turn and



open its eyes heavy with blessed sleep; and even there, as against

the testimony of the senses and the stirring up of emotion, that



saving callousness which reconciles us to the conditions of our

existence, will assert itself under the guise of assent to fatal



necessity, or in the enthusiasm of a purely aesthetic admiration of

the rendering. In this age of knowledge our sympathetic



imagination, to which alone we can look for the ultimatetriumph of

concord and justice, remains strangely impervious to information,



however correctly and even picturesquely conveyed. As to the

vaunted eloquence of a serried array of figures, it has all the



futility of precision without force. It is the exploded

superstition of enthusiastic statisticians. An over-worked horse



falling in front of our windows, a man writhing under a cart-wheel

in the streets awaken more genuineemotion, more horror, pity, and



indignation than the stream of reports, appalling in their

monotony, of tens of thousands of decaying bodies tainting the air






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