“Like wax in the fire,
Like snow in the sun.”
People spoke3 of him as once strong and vigorous, but I recall him fragile and pale, gentle, patient, knowing his inexorable doom4, and not hoping or seeking to escape it. As the end drew near he left his employment and went home to the farm, some twenty miles away, where I drove out to see him once through the deep snow of a winter which was to be his last. My heart was heavy all the time, but he tried to make the visit pass cheerfully with our wonted talk about books. Only at parting, when he took my hand in his thin, cold clasp, he said, “I suppose my disease is progressing,” with the patience he always showed.
I did not see him again, and I am not sure now that his gift was very distinct or very great. It was slight and graceful5 rather, I fancy, and if he had lived it might not have sufficed to make him widely known, but he had a real and a very delicate sense of beauty in literature, and I believe it was through sympathy with his preferences that I came into appreciation6 of several authors whom I had not known, or had not cared for before. There could not have been many shelves of books in that store, and I came to be pretty well acquainted with them all before I began to buy them. For the most part, I do not think it occurred to me that they were there to be sold; for this pale poet seemed indifferent to the commercial property in them, and only to wish me to like them.
I am not sure, but I think it was through some volume which I found in his charge that I first came to know of De Quincey; he was fond of Dr. Holmes’s poetry; he loved Whittier and Longfellow, each represented in his slender stock by some distinctive7 work. There were several stray volumes of Thackeray’s minor8 writings, and I still have the ‘Yellowplush Papers’ in the smooth red cloth (now pretty well tattered) of Appleton’s Popular Library, which I bought there. But most of the books were in the famous old brown cloth of Ticknor & Fields, which was a warrant of excellence9 in the literature it covered. Besides these there were standard volumes of poetry, published by Phillips & Sampson, from wornout plates; for a birthday present my mother got me Wordsworth in this shape, and I am glad to think that I once read the “Excursion” in it, for I do not think I could do so now, and I have a feeling that it is very right and fit to have read the “Excursion.” To be honest, it was very hard reading even then, and I cannot truthfully pretend that I have ever liked Wordsworth except in parts, though for the matter of that, I do not suppose that any one ever did. I tried hard enough to like everything in him, for I had already learned enough to know that I ought to like him, and that if I did not, it was a proof of intellectual and moral inferiority in me. My early idol10, Pope, had already been tumbled into the dust by Lowell, whose lectures on English Poetry had lately been given in Boston, and had met with my rapturous acceptance in such newspaper report as I had of them. So, my preoccupations were all in favor of the Lake School, and it was both in my will and my conscience to like Wordsworth. If I did not do so it was not my fault, and the fault remains11 very much what it first was.
I feel and understand him more deeply than I did then, but I do not think that I then failed of the meaning of much that I read in him, and I am sure that my senses were quick to all the beauty in him. After suffering once through the “Excursion” I did not afflict12 myself with it again, but there were other poems of his which I read over and over, as I fancy it is the habit of every lover of poetry to do with the pieces he is fond of. Still, I do not make out that Wordsworth was ever a passion of mine; on the other hand, neither was Byron. Him, too, I liked in passages and in certain poems which I knew before I read Wordsworth at all; I read him throughout, but I did not try to imitate him, and I did not try to imitate Wordsworth.
Those lectures of Lowell’s had a great influence with me, and I tried to like whatever they bade me like, after a fashion common to young people when they begin to read criticisms; their aesthetic13 pride is touched; they wish to realize that they too can feel the fine things the critic admires. From this motive14 they do a great deal of factitious liking15; but after all the affections will not be bidden, and the critic can only avail to give a point of view, to enlighten a perspective. When I read Lowell’s praises of him, I had all the will in the world to read Spencer, and I really meant to do so, but I have not done so to this day, and as often as I have tried I have found it impossible. It was not so with Chaucer, whom I loved from the first word of his which I found quoted in those lectures, and in Chambers’s ‘Encyclopaedia of English Literature,’ which I had borrowed of my friend the organ-builder.
In fact, I may fairly class Chaucer among my passions, for I read him with that sort of personal attachment16 I had for Cervantes, who resembled him in a certain sweet and cheery humanity. But I do not allege17 this as the reason, for I had the same feeling for Pope, who was not like either of them. Kissing goes by favor, in literature as in life, and one cannot quite account for one’s passions in either; what is certain is, I liked Chaucer and I did not like Spencer; possibly there was an affinity18 between reader and poet, but if there was I should be at a loss to name it, unless it was the liking for reality; and the sense of mother earth in human life. By the time I had read all of Chaucer that I could find in the various collections and criticisms, my father had been made a clerk in the legislature, and on one of his visits home he brought me the poet’s works from the State Library, and I set about reading them with a glossary19. It was not easy, but it brought strength with it, and lifted my heart with a sense of noble companionship.
I will not pretend that I was insensible to the grossness of the poet’s time, which I found often enough in the poet’s verse, as well as the goodness of his nature, and my father seems to have felt a certain misgiving20 about it. He repeated to me the librarian’s question as to whether he thought he ought to put an unexpurgated edition in the hands of a boy, and his own answer that he did not believe it would hurt me. It was a kind of appeal to me to make the event justify21 him, and I suppose he had not given me the book without due reflection. Probably he reasoned that with my greed for all manner of literature the bad would become known to me along with the good at any rate, and I had better know that he knew it.
The streams of filth22 flow down through the ages in literature, which sometimes seems little better than an open sewer23, and, as I have said, I do not see why the time should not come when the noxious24 and noisome25 channels should be stopped; but the base of the mind is bestial26, and so far the beast in us has insisted upon having his full say. The worst of lewd27 literature is that it seems to give a sanction to lewdness28 in the life, and that inexperience takes this effect for reality: that is the danger and the harm, and I think the fact ought not to be blinked. Compared with the meaner poets the greater are the cleaner, and Chaucer was probably safer than any other English poet of his time, but I am not going to pretend that there are not things in Chaucer which a boy would be the better for not reading; and so far as these words of mine shall be taken for counsel, I am not willing that they should unqualifiedly praise him. The matter is by no means simple; it is not easy to conceive of a means of purifying the literature of the past without weakening it, and even falsifying it, but it is best to own that it is in all respects just what it is, and not to feign29 it otherwise. I am not ready to say that the harm from it is positive, but you do get smeared30 with it, and the filthy31 thought lives with the filthy rhyme in the ear, even when it does not corrupt32 the heart or make it seem a light thing for the reader’s tongue and pen to sin in kind.
I loved my Chaucer too well, I hope, not to get some good from the best in him; and my reading of criticism had taught me how and where to look for the best, and to know it when I had found it. Of course I began to copy him. That is, I did not attempt anything like his tales in kind; they must have seemed too hopelessly far away in taste and time, but I studied his verse, and imitated a stanza33 which I found in some of his things and had not found elsewhere; I rejoiced in the freshness and sweetness of his diction, and though I felt that his structure was obsolete34, there was in his wording something homelier and heartier35 than the imported analogues36 that had taken the place of the phrases he used.
I began to employ in my own work the archaic37 words that I fancied most, which was futile38 and foolish enough, and I formed a preference for the simpler Anglo–Saxon woof of our speech, which was not so bad. Of course, being left so much as I was to my own whim39 in such things, I could not keep a just mean; I had an aversion for the Latin derivatives40 which was nothing short of a craze. Some half-bred critic whom I had read made me believe that English could be written without them, and had better be written so, and I did not escape from this lamentable41 error until I had produced with weariness and vexation of spirit several pieces of prose wholly composed of monosyllables. I suspect now that I did not always stop to consider whether my short words were not as Latin by race as any of the long words I rejected, and that I only made sure they were short.
The frivolous42 ingenuity43 which wasted itself in this exercise happily could not hold out long, and in verse it was pretty well helpless from the beginning. Yet I will not altogether blame it, for it made me know, as nothing else could, the resources of our tongue in that sort; and in the revolt from the slavish bondage44 I took upon myself I did not go so far as to plunge45 into any very wild polysyllabic excesses. I still like the little word if it says the thing I want to say as well as the big one, but I honor above all the word that says the thing. At the same time I confess that I have a prejudice against certain words that I cannot overcome; the sight of some offends me, the sound of others, and rather than use one of those detested46 vocables, even when I perceive that it would convey my exact meaning, I would cast about long for some other. I think this is a foible, and a disadvantage, but I do not deny it.
An author who had much to do with preparing me for the quixotic folly47 in point was that Thomas Babington Macaulay, who taught simplicity48 of diction in phrases of as “learned length and thundering sound,” as any he would have had me shun49, and who deplored50 the Latinistic English of Johnson in terms emulous of the great doctor’s orotundity51 and ronderosity. I wonder now that I did not see how my physician avoided his medicine, but I did not, and I went on to spend myself in an endeavor as vain and senseless as any that pedantry52 has conceived. It was none the less absurd because I believed in it so devoutly53, and sacrificed myself to it with such infinite pains and labor54. But this was long after I read Macaulay, who was one of my grand passions before Dickens or Chaucer.
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1
preying
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| v.掠食( prey的现在分词 )；掠食；折磨；（人）靠欺诈为生 | |
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2
wan
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| (wide area network)广域网 | |
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3
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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4
doom
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| n.厄运，劫数；v.注定，命定 | |
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5
graceful
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| adj.优美的，优雅的；得体的 | |
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6
appreciation
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| n.评价；欣赏；感谢；领会，理解；价格上涨 | |
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7
distinctive
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| adj.特别的，有特色的，与众不同的 | |
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8
minor
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| adj.较小(少)的，较次要的；n.辅修学科；vi.辅修 | |
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9
excellence
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| n.优秀，杰出，(pl.)优点，美德 | |
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10
idol
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| n.偶像，红人，宠儿 | |
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11
remains
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| n.剩余物，残留物；遗体，遗迹 | |
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12
afflict
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| vt.使身体或精神受痛苦，折磨 | |
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13
aesthetic
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| adj.美学的，审美的，有美感 | |
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14
motive
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| n.动机，目的；adv.发动的，运动的 | |
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15
liking
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| n.爱好；嗜好；喜欢 | |
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16
attachment
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| n.附属物，附件；依恋；依附 | |
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17
allege
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| vt.宣称，申述，主张，断言 | |
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18
affinity
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| n.亲和力，密切关系 | |
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19
glossary
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| n.注释词表；术语汇编 | |
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20
misgiving
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| n.疑虑，担忧，害怕 | |
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21
justify
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| vt.证明…正当(或有理)，为…辩护 | |
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22
filth
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| n.肮脏，污物，污秽；淫猥 | |
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23
sewer
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| n.排水沟，下水道 | |
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24
noxious
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| adj.有害的，有毒的；使道德败坏的，讨厌的 | |
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25
noisome
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| adj.有害的，可厌的 | |
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26
bestial
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| adj.残忍的；野蛮的 | |
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27
lewd
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| adj.淫荡的 | |
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28
lewdness
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| n. 淫荡, 邪恶 | |
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29
feign
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| vt.假装，佯作 | |
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30
smeared
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| 弄脏； 玷污； 涂抹； 擦上 | |
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31
filthy
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| adj.卑劣的；恶劣的，肮脏的 | |
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32
corrupt
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| v.贿赂，收买；adj.腐败的，贪污的 | |
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33
stanza
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| n.（诗）节，段 | |
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34
obsolete
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| adj.已废弃的，过时的 | |
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35
heartier
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| 亲切的( hearty的比较级 )； 热诚的； 健壮的； 精神饱满的 | |
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36
analogues
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| 相似物( analogue的名词复数 )； 类似物； 类比； 同源词 | |
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37
archaic
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| adj.(语言、词汇等)古代的，已不通用的 | |
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38
futile
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| adj.无效的，无用的，无希望的 | |
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39
whim
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| n.一时的兴致，突然的念头；奇想，幻想 | |
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40
derivatives
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| n.衍生性金融商品；派生物，引出物( derivative的名词复数 )；导数 | |
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41
lamentable
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| adj.令人惋惜的，悔恨的 | |
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42
frivolous
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| adj.轻薄的；轻率的 | |
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43
ingenuity
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| n.别出心裁；善于发明创造 | |
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44
bondage
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| n.奴役，束缚 | |
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45
plunge
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| v.跳入，(使)投入，(使)陷入；猛冲 | |
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46
detested
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| v.憎恶，嫌恶，痛恨( detest的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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47
folly
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| n.愚笨，愚蠢，蠢事，蠢行，傻话 | |
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48
simplicity
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| n.简单，简易；朴素；直率，单纯 | |
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49
shun
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| vt.避开，回避，避免 | |
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50
deplored
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| v.悲叹，痛惜，强烈反对( deplore的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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51
orotundity
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| n.球状，圆形 | |
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52
pedantry
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| n.迂腐，卖弄学问 | |
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53
devoutly
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| adv.虔诚地，虔敬地，衷心地 | |
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54
labor
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| n.劳动，努力，工作，劳工；分娩；vi.劳动，努力，苦干；vt.详细分析；麻烦 | |
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