MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS(回忆与肖像)

VIP免费

2024-12-26 1 0 531.95KB 140 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS

MEMORIES AND

PORTRAITS

By R. L. Stevenson

MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS

CHAPTER I. THE FOREIGNER

AT HOME

"This is no my ain house; I ken by the biggin' o't."

Two recent books (1) one by Mr. Grant White on England, one on

France by the diabolically clever Mr. Hillebrand, may well have set

people thinking on the divisions of races and nations. Such thoughts

should arise with particular congruity and force to inhabitants of that

United Kingdom, peopled from so many different stocks, babbling so

many different dialects, and offering in its extent such singular contrasts,

from the busiest over-population to the unkindliest desert, from the

Black Country to the Moor of Rannoch. It is not only when we cross

the seas that we go abroad; there are foreign parts of England; and the

race that has conquered so wide an empire has not yet managed to

assimilate the islands whence she sprang. Ireland, Wales, and the

Scottish mountains still cling, in part, to their old Gaelic speech. It was

but the other day that English triumphed in Cornwall, and they still show

in Mousehole, on St. Michael's Bay, the house of the last Cornish-

speaking woman. English itself, which will now frank the traveller

through the most of North America, through the greater South Sea

Islands, in India, along much of the coast of Africa, and in the ports of

China and Japan, is still to be heard, in its home country, in half a

hundred varying stages of transition. You may go all over the States,

and - setting aside the actual intrusion and influence of foreigners, negro,

French, or Chinese - you shall scarce meet with so marked a difference

of accent as in the forty miles between Edinburgh and Glasgow, or of

dialect as in the hundred miles between Edinburgh and Aberdeen.

Book English has gone round the world, but at home we still preserve

the racy idioms of our fathers, and every county, in some parts every

dale, has its own quality of speech, vocal or verbal. In like manner,

local custom and prejudice, even local religion and local law, linger on

MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS

into the latter end of the nineteenth century - IMPERIA IN IMPERIO,

foreign things at home.

In spite of these promptings to reflection, ignorance of his

neighbours is the character of the typical John Bull. His is a

domineering nature, steady in fight, imperious to command, but neither

curious nor quick about the life of others. In French colonies, and still

more in the Dutch, I have read that there is an immediate and lively

contact between the dominant and the dominated race, that a certain

sympathy is begotten, or at the least a transfusion of prejudices, making

life easier for both. But the Englishman sits apart, bursting with pride

and ignorance. He figures among his vassal in the hour of peace with

the same disdainful air that led him on to victory. A passing

enthusiasm for some foreign art or fashion may deceive the world, it

cannot impose upon his intimates. He may be amused by a foreigner as

by a monkey, but he will never condescend to study him with any

patience. Miss Bird, an authoress with whom I profess myself in love,

declares all the viands of Japan to be uneatable - a staggering pretension.

So, when the Prince of Wales's marriage was celebrated at Mentone by a

dinner to the Mentonese, it was proposed to give them solid English fare

- roast beef and plum pudding, and no tomfoolery. Here we have either

pole of the Britannic folly. We will not eat the food of any foreigner;

nor, when we have the chance, will we eager him to eat of it himself.

The same spirit inspired Miss Bird's American missionaries, who had

come thousands of miles to change the faith of Japan, and openly

professed their ignorance of the religions they were trying to supplant.

I quote an American in this connection without scruple. Uncle Sam

is better than John Bull, but he is tarred with the English stick. For Mr.

Grant White the States are the New England States and nothing more.

He wonders at the amount of drinking in London; let him try San

Francisco. He wittily reproves English ignorance as to the status of

women in America; but has he not himself forgotten Wyoming? The

name Yankee, of which he is so tenacious, is used over the most of the

great Union as a term of reproach. The Yankee States, of which he is

MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS

so staunch a subject, are but a drop in the bucket. And we find in his

book a vast virgin ignorance of the life and prospects of America; every

view partial, parochial, not raised to the horizon; the moral feeling

proper, at the largest, to a clique of states; and the whole scope and

atmosphere not American, but merely Yankee. I will go far beyond him

in reprobating the assumption and the incivility of my countryfolk to

their cousins from beyond the sea; I grill in my blood over the silly

rudeness of our newspaper articles; and I do not know where to look

when I find myself in company with an American and see my

countrymen unbending to him as to a performing dog. But in the case

of Mr. Grant White example were better than precept. Wyoming is,

after all, more readily accessible to Mr. White than Boston to the English,

and the New England self-sufficiency no better justified than the

Britannic.

It is so, perhaps, in all countries; perhaps in all, men are most

ignorant of the foreigners at home. John Bull is ignorant of the States;

he is probably ignorant of India; but considering his opportunities, he is

far more ignorant of countries nearer his own door. There is one

country, for instance - its frontier not so far from London, its people

closely akin, its language the same in all essentials with the English - of

which I will go bail he knows nothing. His ignorance of the sister

kingdom cannot be described; it can only be illustrated by anecdote. I

once travelled with a man of plausible manners and good intelligence - a

University man, as the phrase goes - a man, besides, who had taken his

degree in life and knew a thing or two about the age we live in. We

were deep in talk, whirling between Peterborough and London; among

other things, he began to describe some piece of legal injustice he had

recently encountered, and I observed in my innocence that things were

not so in Scotland. "I beg your pardon," said he, "this is a matter of

law." He had never heard of the Scots law; nor did he choose to be

informed. The law was the same for the whole country, he told me

roundly; every child knew that. At last, to settle matters, I explained to

him that I was a member of a Scottish legal body, and had stood the

MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS

brunt of an examination in the very law in question. Thereupon he

looked me for a moment full in the face and dropped the conversation.

This is a monstrous instance, if you like, but it does not stand alone in

the experience of Scots.

England and Scotland differ, indeed, in law, in history, in religion, in

education, and in the very look of nature and men's faces, not always

widely, but always trenchantly. Many particulars that struck Mr. Grant

White, a Yankee, struck me, a Scot, no less forcibly; he and I felt

ourselves foreigners on many common provocations. A Scotchman

may tramp the better part of Europe and the United States, and never

again receive so vivid an impression of foreign travel and strange lands

and manners as on his first excursion into England. The change from a

hilly to a level country strikes him with delighted wonder. Along the

flat horizon there arise the frequent venerable towers of churches. He

sees at the end of airy vistas the revolution of the windmill sails. He

may go where he pleases in the future; he may see Alps, and Pyramids,

and lions; but it will be hard to beat the pleasure of that moment.

There are, indeed, few merrier spectacles than that of many windmills

bickering together in a fresh breeze over a woody country; their halting

alacrity of movement, their pleasant business, making bread all day with

uncouth gesticulations, their air, gigantically human, as of a creature half

alive, put a spirit of romance into the tamest landscape. When the

Scotch child sees them first he falls immediately in love; and from that

time forward windmills keep turning in his dreams. And so, in their

degree, with every feature of the life and landscape. The warm,

habitable age of towns and hamlets, the green, settled, ancient look of

the country; the lush hedgerows, stiles, and privy path-ways in the

fields; the sluggish, brimming rivers; chalk and smock-frocks; chimes of

bells and the rapid, pertly-sounding English speech - they are all new to

the curiosity; they are all set to English airs in the child's story that he

tells himself at night. The sharp edge of novelty wears off; the feeling

is scotched, but I doubt whether it is ever killed. Rather it keeps

returning, ever the more rarely and strangely, and even in scenes to

MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS

which you have been long accustomed suddenly awakes and gives a

relish to enjoyment or heightens the sense of isolation.

One thing especially continues unfamiliar to the Scotchman's eye -

the domestic architecture, the look of streets and buildings; the quaint,

venerable age of many, and the thin walls and warm colouring of all.

We have, in Scotland, far fewer ancient buildings, above all in country

places; and those that we have are all of hewn or harled masonry.

Wood has been sparingly used in their construction; the window-frames

are sunken in the wall, not flat to the front, as in England; the roofs are

steeper-pitched; even a hill farm will have a massy, square, cold and

permanent appearance. English houses, in comparison, have the look

of cardboard toys, such as a puff might shatter. And to this the

Scotchman never becomes used. His eye can never rest consciously on

one of these brick houses - rickles of brick, as he might call them - or on

one of these flat-chested streets, but he is instantly reminded where he is,

and instantly travels back in fancy to his home. "This is no my ain

house; I ken by the biggin' o't." And yet perhaps it is his own, bought

with his own money, the key of it long polished in his pocket; but it has

not yet, and never will be, thoroughly adopted by his imagination; nor

does he cease to remember that, in the whole length and breadth of his

native country, there was no building even distantly resembling it.

But it is not alone in scenery and architecture that we count England

foreign. The constitution of society, the very pillars of the empire,

surprise and even pain us. The dull, neglected peasant, sunk in matter,

insolent, gross and servile, makes a startling contrast with our own long-

legged, long-headed, thoughtful, Bible-quoting ploughman. A week or

two in such a place as Suffolk leaves the Scotchman gasping. It seems

incredible that within the boundaries of his own island a class should

have been thus forgotten. Even the educated and intelligent, who hold

our own opinions and speak in our own words, yet seem to hold them

with a difference or, from another reason, and to speak on all things

with less interest and conviction. The first shock of English society is

like a cold plunge. It is possible that the Scot comes looking for too

MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS

much, and to be sure his first experiment will be in the wrong direction.

Yet surely his complaint is grounded; surely the speech of Englishmen is

too often lacking in generous ardour, the better part of the man too often

withheld from the social commerce, and the contact of mind with mind

evaded as with terror. A Scotch peasant will talk more liberally out of

his own experience. He will not put you by with conversational

counters and small jests; he will give you the best of himself, like one

interested in life and man's chief end. A Scotchman is vain, interested

in himself and others, eager for sympathy, setting forth his thoughts and

experience in the best light. The egoism of the Englishman is self-

contained. He does not seek to proselytise. He takes no interest in

Scotland or the Scotch, and, what is the unkindest cut of all, he does not

care to justify his indifference. Give him the wages of going on and

being an Englishman, that is all he asks; and in the meantime, while you

continue to associate, he would rather not be reminded of your baser

origin. Compared with the grand, tree-like self-sufficiency of his

demeanour, the vanity and curiosity of the Scot seem uneasy, vulgar, and

immodest. That you should continually try to establish human and

serious relations, that you should actually feel an interest in John Bull,

and desire and invite a return of interest from him, may argue something

more awake and lively in your mind, but it still puts you in the attitude

of a suitor and a poor relation. Thus even the lowest class of the

educated English towers over a Scotchman by the head and shoulders.

Different indeed is the atmosphere in which Scotch and English

youth begin to look about them, come to themselves in life, and gather

up those first apprehensions which are the material of future thought and,

to a great extent, the rule of future conduct. I have been to school in

both countries, and I found, in the boys of the North, something at once

rougher and more tender, at once more reserve and more expansion, a

greater habitual distance chequered by glimpses of a nearer intimacy,

and on the whole wider extremes of temperament and sensibility. The

boy of the South seems more wholesome, but less thoughtful; he gives

himself to games as to a business, striving to excel, but is not readily

MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS

transported by imagination; the type remains with me as cleaner in mind

and body, more active, fonder of eating, endowed with a lesser and a less

romantic sense of life and of the future, and more immersed in present

circumstances. And certainly, for one thing, English boys are younger

for their age. Sabbath observance makes a series of grim, and perhaps

serviceable, pauses in the tenor of Scotch boyhood - days of great

stillness and solitude for the rebellious mind, when in the dearth of

books and play, and in the intervals of studying the Shorter Catechism,

the intellect and senses prey upon and test each other. The typical

English Sunday, with the huge midday dinner and the plethoric

afternoon, leads perhaps to different results. About the very cradle of

the Scot there goes a hum of metaphysical divinity; and the whole of two

divergent systems is summed up, not merely speciously, in the two first

questions of the rival catechisms, the English tritely inquiring, "What is

your name?" the Scottish striking at the very roots of life with, "What is

the chief end of man?" and answering nobly, if obscurely, "To glorify

God and to enjoy Him for ever." I do not wish to make an idol of the

Shorter Catechism; but the fact of such a question being asked opens to

us Scotch a great field of speculation; and the fact that it is asked of all

of us, from the peer to the ploughboy, binds us more nearly together.

No Englishman of Byron's age, character, and history would have had

patience for long theological discussions on the way to fight for Greece;

but the daft Gordon blood and the Aberdonian school-days kept their

influence to the end. We have spoken of the material conditions; nor

need much more be said of these: of the land lying everywhere more

exposed, of the wind always louder and bleaker, of the black, roaring

winters, of the gloom of high-lying, old stone cities, imminent on the

windy seaboard; compared with the level streets, the warm colouring of

the brick, the domestic quaintness of the architecture, among which

English children begin to grow up and come to themselves in life. As

the stage of the University approaches, the contrast becomes more

express. The English lad goes to Oxford or Cambridge; there, in an

ideal world of gardens, to lead a semi-scenic life, costumed, disciplined

MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS

and drilled by proctors. Nor is this to be regarded merely as a stage of

education; it is a piece of privilege besides, and a step that separates him

further from the bulk of his compatriots. At an earlier age the Scottish

lad begins his greatly different experience of crowded class-rooms, of a

gaunt quadrangle, of a bell hourly booming over the traffic of the city to

recall him from the public-house where he has been lunching, or the

streets where he has been wandering fancy-free. His college life has

little of restraint, and nothing of necessary gentility. He will find no

quiet clique of the exclusive, studious and cultured; no rotten borough of

the arts. All classes rub shoulders on the greasy benches. The raffish

young gentleman in gloves must measure his scholarship with the plain,

clownish laddie from the parish school. They separate, at the session's

end, one to smoke cigars about a watering-place, the other to resume the

labours of the field beside his peasant family. The first muster of a

college class in Scotland is a scene of curious and painful interest; so

many lads, fresh from the heather, hang round the stove in cloddish

embarrassment, ruffled by the presence of their smarter comrades, and

afraid of the sound of their own rustic voices. It was in these early

days, I think, that Professor Blackie won the affection of his pupils,

putting these uncouth, umbrageous students at their ease with ready

human geniality. Thus, at least, we have a healthy democratic

atmosphere to breathe in while at work; even when there is no cordiality

there is always a juxtaposition of the different classes, and in the

competition of study the intellectual power of each is plainly

demonstrated to the other. Our tasks ended, we of the North go forth as

freemen into the humming, lamplit city. At five o'clock you may see

the last of us hiving from the college gates, in the glare of the shop

windows, under the green glimmer of the winter sunset. The frost

tingles in our blood; no proctor lies in wait to intercept us; till the bell

sounds again, we are the masters of the world; and some portion of our

lives is always Saturday, LA TREVE DE DIEU.

Nor must we omit the sense of the nature of his country and his

country's history gradually growing in the child's mind from story and

MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS

from observation. A Scottish child hears much of shipwreck, outlying

iron skerries, pitiless breakers, and great sea-lights; much of heathery

mountains, wild clans, and hunted Covenanters. Breaths come to him in

song of the distant Cheviots and the ring of foraying hoofs. He glories

in his hard-fisted forefathers, of the iron girdle and the handful of oat-

meal, who rode so swiftly and lived so sparely on their raids. Poverty,

ill-luck, enterprise, and constant resolution are the fibres of the legend of

his country's history. The heroes and kings of Scotland have been

tragically fated; the most marking incidents in Scottish history - Flodden,

Darien, or the Forty-five were still either failures or defeats; and the fall

of Wallace and the repeated reverses of the Bruce combine with the very

smallness of the country to teach rather a moral than a material criterion

for life. Britain is altogether small, the mere taproot of her extended

empire: Scotland, again, which alone the Scottish boy adopts in his

imagination, is but a little part of that, and avowedly cold, sterile and

unpopulous. It is not so for nothing. I once seemed to have perceived

in an American boy a greater readiness of sympathy for lands that are

great, and rich, and growing, like his own. It proved to be quite

otherwise: a mere dumb piece of boyish romance, that I had lacked

penetration to divine. But the error serves the purpose of my argument;

for I am sure, at least, that the heart of young Scotland will be always

touched more nearly by paucity of number and Spartan poverty of life.

So we may argue, and yet the difference is not explained. That

Shorter Catechism which I took as being so typical of Scotland, was yet

composed in the city of Westminster. The division of races is more

sharply marked within the borders of Scotland itself than between the

countries. Galloway and Buchan, Lothian and Lochaber, are like

foreign parts; yet you may choose a man from any of them, and, ten to

one, he shall prove to have the headmark of a Scot. A century and a

half ago the Highlander wore a different costume, spoke a different

language, worshipped in another church, held different morals, and

obeyed a different social constitution from his fellow-countrymen either

of the south or north. Even the English, it is recorded, did not loathe

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

MEMORIESANDPORTRAITS1MEMORIESANDPORTRAITSByR.L.StevensonMEMORIESANDPORTRAITS2CHAPTERI.THEFOREIGNERATHOME"Thisisnomyainhouse;Ikenbythebiggin'o't."Tworecentbooks(1)onebyMr.GrantWhiteonEngland,oneonFrancebythediabolicallycleverMr.Hillebrand,maywellhavesetpeoplethinkingonthedivisionsofracesandnations.Su...

收起<<

MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS(回忆与肖像).pdf

共140页,预览28页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS(回忆与肖像)

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: