目录
THE COMMON READER
THE PASTONS AND CHAUCER
ON NOT KNOWING GREEK
THE ELIZABETHAN LUMBER ROOM
NOTES ON AN ELIZABETHAN PLAY
MONTAIGNE
THE DUCHESS OF NEWCASTLE
RAMBLING ROUND EVELYN
DEFOE
ADDISON
THE LIVES OF THE OBSCURE
JANE AUSTEN
MODERN FICTION
"JANE EYRE" AND "WUTHERING HEIGHTS"
GEORGE ELIOT
THE RUSSIAN POINT OF VIEW
OUTLINES
THE PATRON AND THE CROCUS
THE MODERN ESSAY
JOSEPH CONRAD
HOW IT STRIKES A CONTEMPORARY
摘要
yet always be persuading us to move on. Chaucer was helped to this to some extent by the time of his birth; and in addition he had another advantage over the moderns which will never come the way of English poets again. England was an unspoilt country. His eyes rested on a virgin land, all unbroken grass and wood except for the small towns and an occasional castle in the building. No villa roofs peered through Kentish tree-tops; no factory chimney smoked on the hill-side. The state of the country, considering how poets go to Nature, how they use her for their images and their contrasts even when they do not describe her directly, is a matter of some importance. Her cultivation or her savagery influences the poet far more profoundly than the prose writer. To the modern poet, with Birmingham, Manchester, and London the size they are, the country is the sanctuary of moral excellence in contrast with the town which is the sink of vice. It is a retreat, the haunt of modesty and virtue, where men go to hide and moralise. There is something morbid, as if shrinking from human contact, in the nature worship of Wordsworth, still more in the microscopic devotion which Tennyson lavished upon the petals of roses and the buds of lime trees. But these were great poets. In their hands, the country was no mere jeweller's shop, or museum of curious objects to be described, even more curiously, in words. Poets of smaller gift, since the view is so much spoilt, and the garden or the meadow must replace the barren heath and the precipitous mountain-side, are now confined to little landscapes, ……
