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双语·聪明的消遣:毛姆谈英国文学 查尔斯·狄更斯与《大卫·科波菲尔》 5

所属教程:译林版·聪明的消遣:毛姆谈英国文学

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2022年05月17日

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Charles Dickens and David Copperfield 5

In a famous essay, Matthew Arnold insists that poetry to be truly excellent must have a high seriousness, and because he finds it lacking in Chaucer, refuses him, though praising him handsomely, a place among the greatest poets. Arnold was too austere not to look upon humour without a faint misgiving, and I don’t suppose he could ever have been brought to admit that there might be as high a seriousness in Rabelais’ laughter as in Milton's desire to justify the works of God to man. But I see his point, and it does not apply only to poetry. It may be that it is because this high seriousness is lacking in Dickens's novels that, for all their great merits, they leave us faintly dissatisfied. When we read them now with the great French and Russian novels in mind, and not only theirs, but George Eliot's, we are taken aback by their naiveté. In comparison with them, Dickens's are scarcely adult. But, of course, we must remember that we do not read the novels he wrote. We have changed, and they have changed with us. It is impossible for us to recapture the emotions with which his contemporaries read them, as they came hot from the press. In this connection, I will quote a passage from Una Pope-Hennessy's book: “Mrs. Henry Siddons, a neighbour and friend of Lord Jeffrey, peeped into his library and saw Jeffrey with his head on the table. He raised it with his eyes suffused with tears. She begged to be excused, saying, ‘I had no idea that you had any bad news or cause of grief or I would not have come. Is anyone dead?’‘Yes, indeed, ’ replied Lord Jeffrey.‘I’m a great goose to have given away so, but I could not help it. You’ll be sorry to hear that little Nelly, Boz's little Nelly is dead.’”Jeffrey was a Scottish judge, a founder of The Edinburgh Review and a severe, caustic critic.

For my part, Ifind myself still immensely amused by Dickens's humour, but his pathos leaves me cold. I am inclined to say that he had strong emotions, but no heart. I hasten to qualify that. He had a generous heart, a passionate sympathy with the poor and oppressed, and as we know, he took a persistent and effective interest in social reform. But it was an actor's heart, by which I mean that he could feel intensely an emotion that he wished to depict in the same way as an actor playing a tragic part can feel the emotion he represents.“What's Hecuba to him or he to Hecuba?”Here I am reminded of something an actress, at one time in Sarah Bernhardt's Company, told me many years ago. The great artist was playing Phèdre and, in the midst of one of her most moving speeches, when to all appearance she was distraught with anguish, she became aware that some persons standing in one of the wings were loudly talking; she moved towards them and, turning away from the audience as though in her misery to hide her face, hissed out what was the French equivalent to: Stop that bloody row, you lousy bastards; and then, turning back with a magnificent gesture of woe, went on with her tirade to its impressive end. The audience had noticed nothing. It is hard to believe that she could have given expression so noble and tragic to the words she had to utter unless she had truly felt them; but her emotion was a professional emotion, skin-deep, an affair of nerves rather than of heart which had no effect on her self-possession. I have no doubt that Dickens was sincere, but it was an actor's sincerity; and that, perhaps, is why now, no matter how he piled up the agony, we feel that his pathos was not quite genuine and so are no longer moved by it.

But we have no right to ask of an author more than he can give, and if Dickens lacked that high seriousness which Matthew Arnold demanded of the greatest poets, he had much else. He was a very great novelist. He had enormous gifts. He thought David Copperfield the best of all his books. An author is not always a good judge of his own work, but in this case Dickens's judgment seems to me correct. David Copperfield, as I suppose everyone knows, is in great part autobiographical; but Dickens was writing a novel, not an autobiography, and though he drew much of his material from his own life, he made only such use of it as suited his purpose. For the rest, he fell back on his vivid imagination. He was never much of a reader, literary conversation bored him, and such acquaintance with literature as he made later in life seems to have had little effect in lessening the very strong impressions he had received from the works he first read as a boy at Chatham. Of these it was, I think, the novels of Smollett that in the long run chiefly influenced him. The figures Smollett presents to the reader are not so much larger than life as more highly coloured. They are“humours”rather than characters.

So to see people well suited the idiosyncrasy of Dickens's temper. Mr. Micawber was drawn from his father. John Dickens was grandiloquent in speech and shifty in money matters, but he was no fool and far from incompetent; he was industrious, kindly and affectionate. We know what Dickens made of him. If Falstaff is the greatest comic character in literature, Mr. Micawber is the greatest but one. Dickens has been blamed, to my mind unjustly, for making him end up as a respectable magistrate in Australia, and some critics have thought that he should have remained reckless and improvident to the end. Australia was a sparsely settled country. Mr. Micawber was a man of fine presence, of some education and of flamboyant address; I do not see why, in that environment and with those advantages, he should not have attained official position. But it was not only in his creation of comic characters that Dickens was masterly. Steerforth's smooth servant is admirably drawn; he has a mysterious, sinister quality which sends cold shivers down one's back. Uriah Heep smacks of what used to be called transpontine melodrama; but for all that he is a powerful, horrifying figure, and he is most skilfully presented. Indeed, David Copperfield is filled with characters of the most astonishing variety, vividness and originality. There never were such people as the Micawbers, Peggotty and Barkis, Traddles, Betsy Trotwood and Mr. Dick, Uriah Heep and his mother: they are the fantastic inventions of Dickens's exultant imagination; but they have so much vigour, they are so consistent, they are presented with so much verisimilitude and with so much conviction, that while you read, you cannot but believe in them. They may not be real; they are very much alive.

Dickens's general method of creating character was to exaggerate the traits, peculiarities, foibles of his models and to put into the mouth of each one some phrase, or string of phrases, which stamped his quintessence on the reader's mind. He never showed the development of characters and, on the whole, what his creatures were at the beginning they remain at the end. (There are in Dickens's work one or two exceptions, but the change of nature he has indicated is highly unconvincing; it is occasioned to bring about a happy ending.) The danger of drawing character in this way is that the limits of plausibility may be exceeded, and the result is caricature. Caricature is all very well when the author presents you with a character at whom you can laugh, as you can at Mr. Micawber, but it will not serve when he expects you to sympathize. Dickens was never particularly successful with his female characters unless, like Mrs. Micawber, with her“I will never desert Mr. Micawber, ”and Betsy Trotwood, they were caricatured. Dora, drawn after Dickens's first love, Maria Beadnell, is too silly and too childish; Agnes, drawn after Mary and Georgy Hogarth, is too good and too sensible: they are both fearfully tiresome. Little Em’ly seems to me a failure. Dickens evidently meant us to feel pity for her: she only got what she asked for. Her ambition was to be a“lady, ”and in the hope, presumably, that she would be able to get Steerforth to marry her, she ran away with him. She seems to have made him a most unsatisfactory mistress, sullen, tearful and sorry for herself; and it is no wonder that he grew tired of her. The most baffling female character in David Copperfield is Rosa Dartle. I suspect that Dickens meant to make greater use of her in his story than he did, and if he did not do so, it was because he feared to offend his public. I can only suppose that Steerforth had been her lover and she hated him because he had abandoned her, but notwithstanding, loved him still with a jealous, hungry, vindictive love. Dickens here invented a character that Balzac would have made much of. Of the leading actors in David Copperfield, Steerforth is the only one that is drawn“straight, ”using the word as actors do when they speak of a“straight part.”Dickens has given the reader an admirable impression of Steerforth's charm, grace and elegance, his friendliness, his kindliness, his amiable gift of being able to get on with all kinds of people, his gaiety, his courage, his selfishness, his unscrupulousness, his recklessness, his callousness. He has drawn here a portrait of the sort of man that most of us have known, who gives delight wherever he goes and leaves disaster behind him. Dickens brought him to a bad end. Fielding, I think, would have been more lenient; for, as Mrs. Honour, speaking of Tom Jones, put it: “And when wenches are so coming, young men are not so much to be blamed neither; for to be sure they do no more than what is natural.”To-day, the novelist is under the necessity of making the events he relates not only likely, but so far as possible inevitable. Dickens was under no such constraint. That Steerforth, coming from Portugal by sea after an absence from England of some years, should be wrecked and drowned in sight of Yarmouth just when David Copperfield had gone there on a brief visit to his old friends, is a coincidence that really puts too great a strain on the reader's credulity. If Steerforth had to die in order to satisfy the Victorian demand that vice should be punished, Dickens might surely have thought of a more plausible way of bringing this about.

查尔斯·狄更斯与《大卫·科波菲尔》 5

马修·阿诺德曾在他的一篇著名文章中坚持说,诗歌要想真正优秀需得具备高度的严肃性。他认为乔叟缺乏这种严肃性,因此尽管他对乔叟赞美有加,却拒绝在最伟大的诗人行列中给他留下一席之地。阿诺德太严肃,看待幽默时未免带了丝疑虑。我不认为有谁能说服他承认,拉伯雷的大笑中可能也包含着类似弥尔顿想要向世人昭示天道一样的严肃。但是我明白他的意思,而且我认为这个意思不光适用于诗歌。可能正因为狄更斯的小说缺乏这种高度的严肃性,因此即使其优点众多,仍会使我们有一丝不满。我们今天再读他的小说,会惊讶于他的幼稚,因为我们的脑子里已经有了伟大的法俄小说的印象,而且不光是法俄小说,乔治·艾略特的小说也给我们留下了印象。和这些小说比,狄更斯的小说简直还未成年。但是我们必须记住,我们现在读的并不是他当年写的小说。因为我们已经变了,那些小说也和我们一样变了。我们不可能再次捕捉到这些小说新鲜出炉时狄更斯的同代人读它们的感受。关于这点,我将引用乌娜·蒲柏—亨尼斯书中的一段话加以证明。“亨利·希登斯太太是杰弗里勋爵的一个邻居和朋友。有一次她向杰弗里的书房窥探,发现杰弗里正趴在桌上,他抬起头的时候满眼是泪。她请他原谅,说:‘我不知道你收到了坏消息,或者你有令你悲痛的理由,否则我就不来了。是谁死了吗?’‘是的,确实有人死了,’杰弗里勋爵回答道,‘我知道我这么动情很傻,但我真的是情不自禁。你知道了也一定会难过:小耐尔,博兹的小耐尔死了。’”杰弗里是个苏格兰法官,《爱丁堡评论》的创办者,一个严厉刻薄的评论家。

就我而言,我虽然还是觉得狄更斯的幽默非常有趣,但他的悲怆让我觉得冷,让我提不起兴趣。我会说他感情强烈,但他没有心。我得赶快纠正。他对穷人和受压迫者有一颗慷慨的心和极大的同情,我们还知道,他一直持续有效地关注着社会改革。但他的心是一颗演员的心,我说这话的意思是,他可以强烈地感受到某种情感,他也希望表达这种情感,就像一个悲剧演员能够感受到他想要表达的那种情感一样。“赫库芭(5)对他算得了什么,他又对赫库芭算得了什么?”这让我想起多年前莎拉·伯恩哈特(6)剧团的一个女演员对我说的话。有一次这位大艺术家(莎拉·伯恩哈特)饰演费德尔(7),正说到她最感人的一段台词时,在所有人看来她悲痛得都要发疯了,结果她发现舞台一侧有几个工作人员正在大声交谈,于是她向那几个人的方向走去。她转身背向观众,做出在悲痛中把脸藏起来的样子,其实她是在向那几个人嘶吼,法语的意思是:别你妈吵了,你们这帮讨厌的浑蛋。然后,她向观众转过身来,做出一副极度悲伤的姿态,继续她那激烈的长篇演说,直至它令人敬畏地结束。观众什么也没察觉到。很难相信她如果不是真的感受到台词的意思,她能如此高贵、悲壮地说出这些台词,但是她的感情是一种专业的感情,就像皮肤一般浅,只关神经,不关心灵,对她的自控毫无作用。我不怀疑狄更斯是真诚的,但那是一种演员的真诚,这可能也就是为什么不管他怎么堆砌痛苦,我们都觉得他的抒情并不发自内心,都不再被他打动。

但我们无权要求一个作家给予他不具备的东西。如果狄更斯缺乏马修·阿诺德所要求的最伟大的诗人应该具备的高度严肃性,他也还有别的很多东西。他是个很伟大的小说家,他的天赋极高,他认为《大卫·科波菲尔》是他所有作品中最好的一部。虽然作家并不总是能对自己的作品做出公正的判断,但狄更斯对此书的判断在我看来却是正确的。我想每个人都知道,《大卫·科波菲尔》在很大程度上带有自传性质,但是狄更斯写的是小说,不是自传,因此他的取材虽然很多来源于他自己的生活,但他只是把这些素材用于小说创作。对于其余部分,他则依赖自己生动的想象力。他从来都不是个阅读者,文学对话使他厌烦,他后来接触到的文学似乎对他无甚作用,没能消除掉他幼时在查塔姆读到的那些书留给他的深刻印象。从长远看来,我认为那些书中对他影响最大的是斯摩莱特的小说。斯摩莱特向读者展示的那些人物与其说高大夸张,不如说色彩艳明;与其说是“人物”,不如说是“气质”。

所以,看人很适合狄更斯的性情特质。麦考伯源自他父亲。约翰·狄更斯在说话上夸夸其谈,在金钱上极不可靠,但是他不傻,也并非无能。相反,他勤奋、温和、亲切。我们知道狄更斯把他写成了什么样。如果福斯塔夫(8)是文学中第一伟大的喜剧角色,麦考伯就是第二伟大的。有人埋怨狄更斯不该给麦考伯安排一个澳大利亚地方法官的体面结局,我认为这种批评不公正。还有评论家认为麦考伯自始至终都应该是一副行事鲁莽、挥霍无度的样子。可是澳大利亚当时是个人烟稀少之地,麦考伯又是个讲究派头、受过教育、说起话来喜欢炫耀夸大的主儿。我看不出为什么他这么个不乏优点的人在这种情况下就不能弄个一官半职。但是狄更斯的厉害之处不只在创造喜剧人物上,斯蒂尔福斯那个圆滑的仆人他也写得很好。此人有一种神秘、邪恶的气质,能让人脊背发凉。尤赖·希普有一种过去叫作“泰晤士河南岸的闹剧感”(9),但是即便如此,他也一样是个强大、可怕的人物,狄更斯写他的技巧很高超。的确,《大卫·科波菲尔》充满了最多样、最生动、最新颖的人物。文学史上还没有过像麦考伯、辟果提和巴克斯、特莱德、贝特西姨婆和狄克先生、尤赖·希普和他妈那样的人物。他们是狄更斯旺盛想象力的出色创造。他们是那么有活力,那么前后一致,狄更斯对他们的描写又是那么逼真可信,以至于你会边读边情不自禁地信以为真。他们可能并不真实,但是他们鲜活生动。

狄更斯刻画人物的方法通常是夸大其特点、怪癖和弱点,还让他们每个人说一句话或一串话,好把其典型特点深深印在读者的脑子里。他从来不展示人物的发展。整体看来,他的人物开始什么样,最后还什么样。(只有一两个例外,但那时狄更斯所表现的人物性格的变化非常不能令人信服,因为那变化的原因是为了人为地实现大团圆的结局。)如此刻画人物的危险在于合理性的边界似乎被越过,结果就变成了漫画。漫画其实也不错,如果作者给读者看的是一个可以嘲笑的人物,就像你可以嘲笑麦考伯。可是如果作者想让读者同情,漫画就不管用了。狄更斯刻画女性人物从来都不是很成功,除非他可以使其漫画化,比如那个说“我永远都不会抛弃麦考伯先生”的麦考伯太太,再比如贝特西姨婆。朵拉是按狄更斯的初恋玛丽亚·比德内尔刻画的,太傻太幼稚。艾格尼丝是按玛丽和乔琪刻画的,又太好太理智。此外,朵拉和艾格尼丝都极其无趣。小艾米莉在我看来是个失败的形象,狄更斯明显想让我们同情她,可她的结局纯属自找的。她的雄心是想当个“贵妇”,她跟斯蒂尔福斯私奔是因为她以为她能让他娶她,结果她只当了个令他非常不满的情妇:阴郁、爱哭、自怜,时间长了他当然会厌倦她。《大卫·科波菲尔》里最令人不解的女性是罗莎·达特尔。我猜一开始狄更斯是想让她发挥更大作用的,而后来他之所以没这么做,是因为怕会冒犯公众。我只能猜斯蒂尔福斯曾是她的恋人,但是后来抛弃了她,因此她恨他,可又还爱着他,那是一种嫉妒、饥渴、复仇式的爱。狄更斯创造的这个人物到巴尔扎克手里是可以大写特写一番的。在《大卫·科波菲尔》的所有主角里,斯蒂尔福斯是唯一一个“直”写的,取演员们所说一个角色是“直角”的意思。狄更斯给读者提供了一个绝妙的印象,他写了斯蒂尔福斯的魅力、大方、优雅、友好、亲切,他能跟各种人合得来的可爱天赋,他的快活、勇气、自私、没良心、鲁莽、无情。他描绘的这副形象是我们大多数人都认识的一类男人,这类人所到之处都能给人愉悦,可是离开时也都留下了灾难。狄更斯最后给了他一个坏结局,我觉得菲尔丁会更仁慈,因为正如奥诺太太(10)说汤姆·琼斯的那样:“如果女孩们都这么急切,年轻男子也就没什么好指责的了,因为他们所做的无非是天性使然。”今天,小说家不仅要使他的故事情节可信,还得尽可能地逼真。然而狄更斯却不受这样的限制。离开英国多年后,斯蒂尔福斯从葡萄牙坐船回国,居然就在能看得到亚茅斯港时,船沉没被淹死了,而且还正赶上大卫·科波菲尔来此短暂拜访老友。这样的巧合很难令读者信服。如果是为了满足维多利亚时代恶有恶报的要求,斯蒂尔福斯必须死,狄更斯也一定能想出一个更合理的方式。

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