Weary of myself, and sick of asking
What I am, and what I ought to be,
At the vessel’s prow1 I stand, which bears me
Forwards, forwards, o’er the starlit sea.
—Matthew Arnold, “Self-Dependence” (1854)
He did not have a happy passage from Liverpool. He spoke2 frequently to the storm-basin; and when he was not being sick, spent most of his time wondering why he had ever embarked3 for the primitive4 other side of the world. Perhaps it was just as well. He had begun to envisage5 Boston as a miserable6 assembly of log cabins—and the reality, one sunlit morning, of a city of mellow7 brick and white wooden spires8, with that one opulently gold dome9, came as a pleasant reassurance10. Nor did Boston belie11 its first appearance. Just as he had fallen for his Philadelphians, he fell for the mixed graciousness and candor12 of Boston society. He was not exact-ly feted; but within a week of his arrival the two or three introductions he had brought with him had multiplied into open invitations to several houses. He was invited to use the Athenaeum, he had shaken hands with a senator, no less; and with the wrinkled claw of one even greater, if less hectoringly loquacious—the elder Dana, a Founding Father of American letters, and then in his eightieth year. A far more famous writer still, whom one might have not very interestedly chat-ted to if one had chanced to gain entry to the Lowell circle in Cambridge, and who was himself on the early threshold of a decision precisely13 the opposite in its motives14 and predispo-sitions, a ship, as it were, straining at its moorings in a contrary current and arming for its sinuous15 and loxodromic voyage to the richer though silted16 harbor of Rye (but I must not ape the master), Charles did not meet.
Even though he dutifully paid his respects to the Cradle of Liberty in Faneuil Hall, he encountered also a certain amount of hostility18, for Britain was not forgiven its recent devious19 part in the Civil War, and there existed a stereotype20 of John Bull just as grossly oversimplified as that of Uncle Sam. But Charles quite plainly did not fit that stereotype; he proclaimed that he saw very well the justice of the War of Independence, he admired Boston as the center of American learning, of the Anti-Slavery Movement, and countless21 other things. He let himself be ribbed about tea parties and red-coats with a smiling sang-froid, and took very great care not to condescend22. I think two things pleased him best—the delicious newness of the nature: new plants, new trees, new birds—and, as he discovered when he crossed the river of his name and visited Harvard, some entrancing new fossils. And the other pleasure lay in the Americans themselves. At first, perhaps, he noticed a certain lack of the finer shades of irony23; and he had to surmount24 one or two embarrassing contretemps when humorously intended remarks were taken at face value. But there were such compensations ... a frankness, a directness of approach, a charming curiosity that accompanied the open hospitality: a naivety25, perhaps, yet with a face that seemed delightfully26 fresh-complexioned after the farded culture of Europe. This face took, very soon, a distinctly female cast. Young American women were far more freely spoken than their European contemporaries; the transatlantic emancipation28 movement was already twenty years old. Charles found their forwardness very attractive.
The attraction was reciprocated29, since in Boston at any rate a superiority in the more feminine aspects of social taste was still readily conceded to London. He might, perhaps, very soon have lost his heart; but there traveled with him always the memory of that dreadful document Mr. Freeman had extorted30. It stood between him and every innocent girl’s face he saw; only one face could forgive and exorcize it.
Besides, in so many of these American faces he saw a shadow of Sarah: they had something of her challenge, her directness. In a way they revived his old image of her: she had been a remarkable31 woman, and she would have been at home here. In fact, he thought more and more of Mon-tague’s suggestion: perhaps she was at home here. He had spent the previous fifteen months in countries where the national differences in look and costume very seldom revived memory of her. Here he was among a womanhood of largely Anglo-Saxon and Irish stock. A dozen times, in his first days, he was brought to a stop by a certain shade of auburn hair, a free way of walking, a figure.
Once, as he made his way to the Athenaeum across the Common, he saw a girl ahead of him on an oblique32 path. He strode across the grass, he was so sure. But she was not Sarah. And he had to stammer33 an apology. He went on his way shaken, so intense in those few moments had been his excitement. The next day he advertised in a Boston newspa-per. Wherever he went after that he advertised.
The first snow fell, and Charles moved south. He visited Manhattan, and liked it less than Boston. Then spent a very agreeable fortnight with his France-met friends in their city; the famous later joke (“First prize, one week in Philadelphia; second prize, two weeks”) he would not have found just. From there he drifted south; so Baltimore saw him, and Washington, Richmond and Raleigh, and a constant delight of new nature, new climate: new meteorological climate, that is, for the political climate—we are now in the Decem-ber of 1868—was the very reverse of delightful27. Charles found himself in devastated34 towns and among very bitter men, the victims of Reconstruction35; with a disastrous36 pres-ident, Andrew Johnson, about to give way to a catastrophic one, Ulysses S. Grant. He found he had to grow British again in Virginia, though by an irony he did not appreciate, the ancestors of the gentlemen he conversed37 with there and in the Carolinas were almost alone in the colonial upper classes of 1775 in supporting the Revolution; he even heard wild talk of a new secession and reunification with Britain. But he passed diplomatically and unscathed through all these trou-bles, not fully17 understanding what was going on, but sensing the strange vastness and frustrated38 energy of this split nation.
His feelings were perhaps not very different from an En-glishman in the United States of today: so much that re-pelled, so much that was good; so much chicanery39, so much honesty; so much brutality40 and violence, so much concern and striving for a better society. He passed the month of January in battered41 Charleston; and now for the first time he began to wonder whether he was traveling or emigrating. He noticed that certain American turns of phrase and inflections were creeping into his speech; he found himself taking sides— or more precisely, being split rather like America itself, since he both thought it right to abolish slavery and sympathized with the anger of the Southerners who knew only too well what the carpetbaggers’ solicitude42 for Negro emancipation was really about. He found himself at home among the sweet belles43 and rancorous captains and colonels, but then remem-bered Boston—pinker cheeks and whiter souls ... more Puri-tan souls, anyway. He saw himself happier there, in the final analysis; and as if to prove it by paradox44 set off to go farther south.
He was no longer bored. What the experience of America, perhaps in particular the America of that time, had given him—or given him back—was a kind of faith in freedom; the determination he saw around him, however unhappy its immediate45 consequences, to master a national destiny had a liberating46 rather than a depressing effect. He began to see the often risible47 provinciality48 of his hosts as a condition of their lack of hypocrisy49. Even the only too abundant evidence of a restless dissatisfaction, a tendency to take the law into one’s own hands—a process which always turns the judge into the executioner—in short, the endemic violence caused by a Liberte-besotted constitution, found some justification50 in Charles’s eyes. A spirit of anarchy51 was all over the South; and yet even that seemed to him preferable to the rigid52 iron rule of his own country.
But he said all this for himself. One calm evening, while still at Charleston, he chanced to find himself on a promonto-ry facing towards Europe three thousand miles away. He wrote a poem there; a better, a little better than the last of his you read.
Came they to seek some greater truth Than Albion’s hoary53 locks allow? Lies there a question in their youth We have not dared to ask ere now?
I stand, a stranger in their clime, Yet common to their minds and ends;
Methinks in them I see a time
To which a happier man ascends54
And there shall all his brothers be—
A Paradise wrought55 upon these rocks
What matter if the mother mocks
The infant child’s first feeble hands?
What matter if today he fail
Provided that at last he stands
And breaks the blind maternal57 pale?
For he shall one day walk in pride
The vast calm indigoes58 of this land
And eastward59 turn, and bless the tide
That brought him to the saving strand60.
And there, amid the iambic slog-and-smog and rhetorical question marks, and the really not too bad “vast calm indi-goes,” let us leave Charles for a paragraph.
It was nearly three months after Mary had told her news— the very end of April. But in that interval61 Fortune had put Sam further in her debt by giving him the male second edition he so much wanted. It was a Sunday, an evening full of green-gold buds and church bells, with little chinkings and clatterings downstairs that showed his newly risen young wife and her help were preparing his supper; and with one child struggling to stand at the knees on which the three-weeks-old brother lay, dark little screwed-up eyes that already delighted Sam (“Sharp as razors, the little monkey”), it happened: something in those eyes did cut Sam’s not absolutely Bostoni-an soul.
Two days later Charles, by then peregrinated to New Orleans, came from a promenade62 in the Vieux Carre into his hotel. The clerk handed him a cable.
It said: SHE is found. london. montague.
Charles read the words and turned away. After so long, so much between ... he stared without seeing out into the busy street. From nowhere, no emotional correlative, he felt his eyes smart with tears. He moved outside, onto the porch of the hotel, and there lit himself a stogie. A minute or two later he returned to the desk.
“The next ship to Europe—can you tell me when she sails?”
收听单词发音 |
1
prow
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| n.(飞机)机头，船头 | |
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spoke
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| n.（车轮的）辐条；轮辐；破坏某人的计划；阻挠某人的行动 v.讲，谈（speak的过去式）；说；演说；从某种观点来说 | |
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embarked
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| 乘船( embark的过去式和过去分词 )； 装载； 从事 | |
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primitive
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| adj.原始的；简单的；n.原(始)人，原始事物 | |
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envisage
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| v.想象，设想，展望，正视 | |
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miserable
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| adj.悲惨的，痛苦的；可怜的，糟糕的 | |
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mellow
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| adj.柔和的；熟透的；v.变柔和；(使)成熟 | |
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spires
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| n.（教堂的） 塔尖，尖顶( spire的名词复数 ) | |
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9
dome
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| n.圆屋顶，拱顶 | |
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reassurance
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| n.使放心，使消除疑虑 | |
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belie
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| v.掩饰，证明为假 | |
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candor
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| n.坦白，率真 | |
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precisely
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| adv.恰好，正好，精确地，细致地 | |
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motives
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| n.动机，目的( motive的名词复数 ) | |
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sinuous
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| adj.蜿蜒的，迂回的 | |
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silted
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| v.（河流等）为淤泥淤塞( silt的过去式和过去分词 )；（使）淤塞 | |
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fully
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| adv.完全地，全部地，彻底地；充分地 | |
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18
hostility
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| n.敌对，敌意；抵制［pl.］交战，战争 | |
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19
devious
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| adj.不坦率的，狡猾的；迂回的，曲折的 | |
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stereotype
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| n.固定的形象，陈规，老套，旧框框 | |
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21
countless
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| adj.无数的，多得不计其数的 | |
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condescend
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| v.俯就，屈尊；堕落，丢丑 | |
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irony
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| n.反语，冷嘲；具有讽刺意味的事，嘲弄 | |
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surmount
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| vt.克服；置于…顶上 | |
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25
naivety
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| n.天真，纯朴，幼稚 | |
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delightfully
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| 大喜，欣然 | |
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delightful
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| adj.令人高兴的，使人快乐的 | |
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28
emancipation
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| n.（从束缚、支配下）解放 | |
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29
reciprocated
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| v.报答，酬答( reciprocate的过去式和过去分词 )；（机器的部件）直线往复运动 | |
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30
extorted
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| v.敲诈( extort的过去式和过去分词 )；曲解 | |
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31
remarkable
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| adj.显著的，异常的，非凡的，值得注意的 | |
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oblique
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| adj.斜的，倾斜的，无诚意的，不坦率的 | |
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33
stammer
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| n.结巴，口吃；v.结结巴巴地说 | |
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34
devastated
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| v.彻底破坏( devastate的过去式和过去分词)；摧毁；毁灭；在感情上（精神上、财务上等）压垮adj.毁坏的；极为震惊的 | |
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35
reconstruction
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| n.重建，再现，复原 | |
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36
disastrous
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| adj.灾难性的，造成灾害的；极坏的，很糟的 | |
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conversed
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| v.交谈，谈话( converse的过去式 ) | |
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38
frustrated
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| adj.挫败的，失意的，泄气的v.使不成功( frustrate的过去式和过去分词 )；挫败；使受挫折；令人沮丧 | |
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chicanery
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| n.欺诈，欺骗 | |
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40
brutality
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| n.野蛮的行为，残忍，野蛮 | |
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41
battered
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| adj.磨损的；v.连续猛击；磨损 | |
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42
solicitude
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| n.焦虑 | |
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43
belles
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| n.美女( belle的名词复数 )；最美的美女 | |
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44
paradox
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| n.似乎矛盾却正确的说法；自相矛盾的人(物) | |
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immediate
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| adj.立即的；直接的，最接近的；紧靠的 | |
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46
liberating
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| 解放，释放( liberate的现在分词 ) | |
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47
risible
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| adj.能笑的；可笑的 | |
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48
provinciality
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| n.乡下习气，粗鄙；偏狭 | |
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49
hypocrisy
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| n.伪善，虚伪 | |
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50
justification
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| n.正当的理由；辩解的理由 | |
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51
anarchy
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| n.无政府状态；社会秩序混乱，无秩序 | |
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52
rigid
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| adj.严格的，死板的；刚硬的，僵硬的 | |
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53
hoary
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| adj.古老的；鬓发斑白的 | |
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54
ascends
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| v.上升，攀登( ascend的第三人称单数 ) | |
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55
wrought
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| v.引起；以…原料制作；运转；adj.制造的 | |
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56
vile
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| adj.卑鄙的，可耻的，邪恶的；坏透的 | |
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57
maternal
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| adj.母亲的，母亲般的，母系的，母方的 | |
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58
indigoes
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| n.靛蓝色( indigo的名词复数 )；溶靛素 | |
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eastward
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| adv.向东；adj.向东的；n.东方，东部 | |
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60
strand
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| vt.使（船）搁浅，使（某人）困于（某地） | |
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interval
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| n.间隔，间距；幕间休息，中场休息 | |
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62
promenade
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| n./v.散步 | |
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