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高級英語教材第45課
先讀課文﹕
Past and Present
by Thomas Carlyle
Book IV - Horoscope
Chapter I ﹕Aristocracies
To predict the Future, to manage the Present, would not be so impossible,
had not the Past been so sacrilegiously mishandled; effaced, and what is
worse, defaced! The Past cannot be seen; the Past, looked at through the
medium of 'Philosophical History' in these times, cannot even be _not_ seen:
it is misseen; affirmed to have existed,--and to have been a godless
Impossibility. Your Norman Conquerors, true royal souls, crowned kings as
such, were vulturous irrational tyrants: your Becket was a noisy egoist
and hypocrite; getting his brains spilt on the floor of Canterbury Cathedral,
to secure the main chance,--somewhat uncertain how! "Enthusiasm," and even
"honest Enthusiasm,"--yes, of course:
"The Dog, to gain his private ends,
_Went_ mad, and bit the Man!--"
For in truth, the eye sees in all things "what it brought with it the means
of seeing." A godless century, looking back on centuries that were godly,
produces portraitures more miraculous
than any other. All was inane discord in the Past; brute Force bore rule
everywhere; Stupidity, savage Unreason, fitter for Bedlam than for a human
World! Whereby indeed it becomes
sufficiently natural that the like qualities, in new sleeker habiliments,
should continue in our time to rule. Millions enchanted in Bastille Workhouses;
Irish Widows proving their
relationship by typhus-fever: what would you have? It was ever so, or worse.
Man's History, was it not always even this: The cookery and eating up of
imbecile Dupedom by successful
Quackhood; the battle, with various weapons, of vulturous Quack and Tyrant
against vulturous Tyrant and Quack? No God was in the Past Time; nothing
but Mechanisms and Chaotic Brute-gods:--how shall the poor "Philosophic
Historian," to whom his own century is all godless, see any God in other
centuries?
Men believe in Bibles, and disbelieve in them: but of all Bibles the frightfulest
to disbelieve in is this "Bible of Universal History." This is the Eternal
Bible and God's-Book, "which every born man," till once the soul and eyesight
are distinguished in him, "can and must, with his own eyes, see the God's-Finger
writing!" To discredit this, is an _infidelity_ like no other.
Such infidelity you would punish, if not by fire and faggot, which are difficult
to manage in our times, yet by the most peremptory order, To hold its peace
till it got something wiser to say. Why should the blessed Silence be broken
into noises, to communicate only the like of this? If the Past have no God's-
Reason in it, nothing but Devil's-Unreason, let the Past be eternally forgotten:
mention it no more;--we whose ancestors were all hanged, why should we talk
of ropes!
It is, in brief, not true that men ever lived by Delirium, Hypocrisy, Injustice,
or any form of Unreason, since they came to inhabit this Planet. It is
not true that they ever did, or ever
will, live except by the reverse of these. Men will again be taught this.
Their acted History will then again be a Heroism; their written History,
what it once was, an Epic. Nay, forever it is either such; or else it virtually
is--Nothing. Were it written in a thousand volumes, the Unheroic of such
volumes hastens incessantly to be forgotten; the net content of an Alexandrian
Library of Unheroics is, and will ultimately shew itself to be, _zero._
What man is interested to remember _it,_have not all men, at all times,
the liveliest interest to forget it?--"Revelations," if not celestial, then
infernal, will teach us that God is; we shall then, if needful, discern without
difficulty that He has always been! The Dryasdust Philosophisms and enlightened
Scepticisms of the Eighteenth Century, historical and other, will have to
survive for a while with the Physiologists, as a memorable _Nightmare-Dream._
All this haggard epoch, with its ghastly Doctrines, and death's-head Philosophies
"teaching by example" or otherwise, will one day
have become, what to our Moslem friends their godless ages are, "the Period
of Ignorance."
If the convulsive struggles of the last Half-Century have taught poor struggling
convulsed Europe any truth, it may perhaps be this as the essence of innumerable
others: That Europe requires a real Aristocracy, a real Priesthood, or it
cannot continue to exist. Huge French Revolutions, Napoleonisms, then Bourbonisms
with their corollary of Three Days, finishing in very unfinal Louis-Philippisms:
all this ought to be didactic! All this may have taught us, That False Aristocracies
are insupportable; that No-Aristocracies, Liberty-and-Equalities are impossible;
that True Aristocracies are at once indispensable and not easily attained.
Aristocracy and Priesthood, a Governing Class and a Teaching Class: these
two, sometimes separate, and endeavouring to harmonise themselves, sometimes
conjoined as one, and the King a Pontiff-King:--there did no Society exist
without these two vital elements, there will none exist. It lies in the
very nature of man: you will visit no remotest village in the most republican
country of the world, where virtually or actually you do not find these two
powers at work. Man, little as he may suppose it, is necessitated to obey
superiors. He is a social being in virtue of this necessity; nay he could
not be gregarious otherwise. He obeys those whom he esteems better than
himself, wiser, braver; and will forever obey such; and even be ready and
delighted to do it.
The Wiser, Braver: these, a Virtual Aristocracy everywhere and everywhen,
do in all Societies that reach any articulate shape, develop themselves
into a ruling class, an Actual Aristocracy, with settled modes of operating,
what are called laws and even _private-laws_ or privileges, and so forth;
very notable to look upon in this world.--Aristocracy and Priesthood, we
say, are sometimes united. For indeed the Wiser and the Braver are properly
but one class; no wise man but needed first of all to be a brave man, or
he never had been wise. The noble Priest was always a noble Aristos to begin
with, and something more to end with. Your Luther, your Knox, your Anselm,
Becket, Abbot Samson, Samuel Johnson, if they had not been brave enough,
by what possibility could they ever have been wise?--If, from accident or
forethought, this your Actual Aristocracy have got discriminated into Two
Classes, there can be no doubt but the Priest Class is the more dignified;
supreme over the other, as governing head is over active hand. And yet in
practice again, it is likeliest the reverse will be found arranged;--a sign
that the arrangement is already vitiated; that a split is introduced into
it, which will widen and widen till the whole be rent asunder. 本章太長﹐
切割了。要讀下去的人可古狗。
1) 生詞自查。
2) 作者介紹﹕Thomas Carlyle (4 December 1795 -- 5 February 1881) was a Scottish
satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher during the Victorian era.
He called economics "the dismal science", wrote articles for the Edinburgh
Encyclopedia, and became a controversial social commentator. Coming from
a strict Calvinist family, Carlyle was expected to become a preacher by
his parents, but while at the University of Edinburgh he lost his Christian
faith. Calvinist values, however, remained with him throughout his life.
His combination of a religious temperament with loss of faith in traditional
Christianity, made Carlyle's work appealing to many Victorians who were
grappling with scientific and political changes that threatened the traditional
social order. He brought a trenchant style to his social and political criticism
and a complex literary style to works such as The French Revolution: A History
(1837). Dickens used Carlyle's work as a primary source for the events of
the French Revolution in his novel A Tale of Two Cities.
3) 本書介紹﹕Past and Present is a book by Thomas Carlyle. It was published
in April 1843 in England and the following month in the United States. It
combines medieval history with criticism of 19th-century British society.
Carlyle wrote it in seven weeks as a respite from the harassing labor of
writing Cromwell. He was inspired by the recently published Chronicles of
the Abbey of Saint Edmund's Bury, which had been written by Jocelin of Brakelond
at the close of the 12th century. This account of a medieval monastery had
taken Carlyle's fancy, and he drew upon it in order to contrast the monks'
reverence for work and heroism with the sham leadership of his own day.
4) Thomas Carlyle 也是有名作家。他主要寫的不是小說。但以諷刺筆調著名。我
們可學習一下這種筆調。開闊我們的寫作視野。
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发表于 2012-6-30 02:10:45