阅读理解
An introduction to this book is as superfluous
as a candle in front of a powerful searchlight. But a convention of publishing
seems to require that the candle should be there, and I am proud to be the one
to hold it. About ten years ago I picked up from the pile of new books on my
desk a copy of Sons and Lovers by a
man of whom I had never heard, and I started to race through it with the
immoral speed of the professional reviewer. But after a page or two I found
myself reading, really reading. Here was—here is—a masterpiece in which every
sentence counts, a book packed with significant thought and beautiful,
arresting phrases, the work of a remarkable genius whose gifts are more richly
various than those of any other young English novelist.
To appreciate the rich variety of Mr.
Lawrence we must read his later novels and his volumes of poetry. But Sons and Lovers reveals the range of his
power. Here are combined and blended(混合的) sort of “realism” and almost lyric(抒情的) imagery and rhythm. The speech of the
people is that of daily life and the things that happen to them are normal
adventures and accidents; they fall in love, marry, work, fail, succeed, and
die. But of their deeper emotions and of the relations of these little human
beings to the earth and to the stars, Mr. Lawrence makes something near to
poetry and prose(散文)
without violating its proper “other harmony.”
Take the marvellous paragraph on next to
the last page of Sons and Lovers (Mr. Lawrence depends so little on plot in the
ordinary sense of the word that it is perfectly fair to read the end of his
book first):
Where was he? One tiny upright speck of
flesh, less than an ear of wheat lost in the field. He could not bear it. On
every side the immense dark silence seemed pressing him, so tiny a spark, into
extinction, and yet, almost nothing, he could not be extinct. Night, in which
everything was lost, went reaching out, beyond stars and sun, stars and sun, a
few bright grains, went spinning round for terror, and holding each other in
embrace, there in the darkness that outpassed them all, and left them tiny and
daunted(气馁). So much, and himself, infinitesimal,
at the core a nothingness, and yet not nothing.
Such glorious writing lifts the book far
above a novel which is merely a story. I beg the reader to attend to every line
of it and not to miss a single one of the many sentences that await and
surprise you. Some are enthusiastic and impressive, like the paragraph above;
others are keen, “realistic” observations of things and people. In one of his
books Mr. Lawrence makes a character say, or think, that life is “mixed.” That
indicates his philosophy and his method. He blends the accurately literal and
trivial(琐碎的) with the extremely poetic.
To find a similar blending of tiny daily
detail and wide imaginative vision, we must go back to two older novelists,
Hardy and Meredith. I do not mean that Mr. Lawrence derives(源于) immediately from them or, indeed,
that he is clearly the disciple(弟子) of any master. I do feel simply that
he is of the elder stature(名望) of Hardy and Meredith, and I know of no other young
novelist who is quite worthy of their company. When I first tried to express
this comparison, this connection, I was contradicted by a fellow-critic, who
pointed out that Meredith and Hardy are entirely unlike each other and that
therefore Mr. Lawrence cannot resemble both. To be sure, nothing is more
hateful than forced comparisons, nothing more boring than to discover parallels
between one work of art and another. An artist's mastery consists in his
difference from other masters. But to refer a young man of genius to an older
one, at the same time pronouncing his independence and originality, is a fair,
if not very superior, method of praising him.
