【英文读物】The Valley of Squinting Windows.docx

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1、【英文读物】The Valley of Squinting WindowsPREFATORY NOTE In the parlor, as they call it, or best room of every Irish farmhouse, one may come upon a certain number of books that are never read, laid there in lonely repose upon the big square table on the middle of the floor. A novel entitled Knocknagow is

2、 almost always certain to be amongst them, yet scarcely as the result of selection, although its constant occurrence cannot be considered purely accidental. There must lurk an explanation somewhere about these quiet Irish houses connecting the very atmosphere with Knocknagow. A stranger, thinking of

3、 some of the great books of the world, would almost feel inclined to believe that this story of the quiet homesteads of Ireland must be one of them, a book full of inspiration and truth and beauty, a story sprung from the bleeding realities which were before the present comfort of these homes. Yet f

4、or all the expectations which might be raised up in one by this most popular, this typical Irish novel, it is most certainly the book with which the new Irish novelist would endeavor to contrast his own. For he would be writing of life, as the modern novelists art is essentially a realistic one, and

5、 not of the queer, distant, half pleasing, half saddening thing which could make one Irish farmers daughter say to another at any time within the past forty years: And youd often see things happening nearly in real life like in Knocknagow. Now wouldnt you? Nearer by a long way than Charles Joseph Ki

6、ckhamPg x to what the Irish novelist should have been was William Carleton in his great, gloomy, melodramatic stories of the land. He was prevented by the agrarian obsession of his time from having the clear vision and wide pity, in keeping with his vehemence, which might have made him the Irish Bal

7、zac. Even in Ireland Lever and Lover have become unpopular. They are read only by Englishmen who still try to perpetuate their comic convention when they write newspaper articles about Ireland. As with Kickham, largely in his treatment of the Irish peasant, Gerald Griffin in The Collegians did not s

8、ucceed in giving his Irish middle or strong farmer class characters the spiritual energy so necessary to the literary subject. Here are five writers then, who included in their work such exact opposites as saints and sinners, heroes and omadhanns, earnest passionate men and broths of bhoys. And some

9、how between them, between those who wrote to degrade us and those who have idealized us, the real Irishman did not come to be set down. From its fiction, reality was absent, as from most other aspects of Irish life. To a certain extent the realistic method has been employed by the dramatists of the

10、Irish Literary Movement, but necessarily limited by the scope and conventions of the stage and by the narrower appeal of the spoken word in the mouth of an actor. The stage, too, has a way of developing cults and conventions and of its very nature must display a certain amount of artificiality, even

11、 in the handling of realistic material. Thus comes a sudden stagnation, a sudden completion alwaysPg xi of a literary movement developed mostly upon the dramatic side, as has come upon the work of the Abbey Theater. It appears rather accidental, but perhaps on the whole to its benefit, that the dram

12、atic form should have been adopted by J. M. Synge and not the epical form of the novel. Synge fell with a lash of surprise upon the Ireland of his time, for the Irish play had been as fully degraded as the Irish novel. Furthermore the shock of his genius created an opportunity which made possible th

13、e realistic Irish novelist. At the Abbey Theater they performed plays dealing with subjects which no Irish novelist, thinking of a public, would have dreamt of handling. Somehow their plays have come to be known and accepted throughout Ireland. Thus a reading public for this realistic Irish novel ha

14、s been slowly created and the urge to write like this has come to many storytellers. Of necessity, as part of the reaction from the work of the feeble masters we have known, the first examples of the new Irish novel were bound to be a little savage and pitiless. In former pictures of Irish life ther

15、e was heavy labor always to give us the shade at the expense of the light, in fact at the expense of the truth which is life itself. In Ireland the protest of the realist is not so much against Romanticism as against an attempt made to place before us a pseudo-realism. According as the Irish people

16、resign themselves to the fact that this is not a thing which should not be done, the work of the Irish realist will approximate more nearly to the quality of the Russian novelists, in which there are neither exaggerations of Light nor of Shade, but a picture of life allPg xii gray and quiet, and bri

17、ghtened only by the beauty of tragic reality. It leaves room for interesting speculation, that at a time of political chaos, at a time when in Ireland there is a great coming and going of politicians of all brands, dreamers, sages and mystics, the decline of the Irish Literary Movement on its dramat

18、ic side should have given the realistic Irish novelist his opportunity to appear. The urgent necessity of reality in Irish life at the moment fills one with the thought that a school of Irish realists might have brought finer things to the heart of Ireland than the Hy Brazil of the politicians. The

19、function of the Irish novelist to evoke reality has been proved in the case of The Valley of the Squinting Windows. Upon its appearance the people of that part of Ireland with whom I deal in my writings became highly incensed. They burned my book after the best medieval fashion and resorted to acts

20、of healthy violence. The romantic period seemed to have been cut out of their lives and they were full of life again. The story of my story became widely exaggerated through gradually increasing venom and my book, which had been well received by the official Irish Press,whose reviewers generally rea

21、d the books they write aboutwas supposed by some of my own people to contain the most frightful things. To the peasant mind, fed so long upon unreal tales of itself, the thing I had done became identified after the most incongruous fashion and very curiously with an aspect of the very literary assoc

22、iation from which I had sprung. Language out of Synges Playboy of the Western World came to my ears from every side during the days in which I was made to suffer forPg xiii having written The Valley of the Squinting Windows. And saving your presence, sir, are you the man that killed your father? I a

23、m, God help me! Well then, my thousand blessings to you! The country as a whole did not dislike my picture of Irish life or say it was untrue. It was only the particular section of life which was pictured that still asserted its right to the consolation of romantic treatment, but in its very attempt

24、 to retain romance in theory it became realistic in practise. It did exactly what it should have done a great many years ago with the kind of books from which it drew a certain poisonous comfort towards its own intellectual and political enslavement. The rest of Ireland was amused by the performance

25、 of those who did not think, with Mr. Yeats, that romantic Ireland was dead and gone. The realist had begun to evoke reality and no longer did a great screech sound through the land that this kind of thing should not be done. A change had come, by miraculous coincidence, upon the soul of Ireland. It

26、 was not afraid of realism now,for it had faced the tragic reality of the travail which comes before a healthy national consciousness can be born. No longer would the realist be described in his own country as merely a morbid scoundrel or an enemy of the Irish people. They would not need again the s

27、olace of the sentimental novelist for all the offenses of the caricaturists in Irish fiction, because, with the wider and clearer vision of their own souls fully realized, had they already begun to look out upon the world. Brinsley MacNamara. Dublin, March 1st, 1919.CHAPTER I Mrs. Brennan took her s

28、eat again at the sewing-machine by the window. She sighed as she turned her tired eyes in search of some inducement to solace down the white road through the valley of Tullahanogue. The day was already bright above the fields and groups of children were beginning to pass through the morning on their

29、 way to school. Mrs. Brennan beheld their passage, yet now as always she seemed to miss the small beauty of the little pageant. God help them, the poor little things! she condoled to herself, and may He enlighten the unfortunate parents who send them to that quare, ould, ignorant pair, Master Donnel

30、lan and Mrs. Wyse, the mistress. Musha, sure theyre no teachers! From this it might seem that Mrs. Brennan, the dressmaker of the valley and one well entitled to be giving out an opinion, did not think very highly of National Education. Yet it was not true that she failed to regard the lofty fact of

31、 education with all a peasants stupid reverence, for was she not the mother of John Brennan, who was now preparing for the priesthood at a grand college in England? A priest, mind you! That was what you might call something for a woman to be! Pg 2 The pride of her motherhood struck a high and resoun

32、ding note in the life of the valley. Furthermore, it gave her authority to assert herself as a woman of remarkable standing amongst the people. She devoted her prerogative to the advancement of the Catholic Church. She manifested herself as one intensely interested in its welfare. There was no cheap

33、 religious periodical, from The Catholic Times to The Messenger, that she did not regularly purchase. All these she read to her husband, Ned Brennan, in the long quiet evenings after the manner of one discharging a religious duty. This was a curious side of her. She kept him in comfort and in ease,

34、and yet when his body had been contented she must needs apply herself to the welfare of his soul. For, although he spent many a penny of her money in the village of Garradrimna, was he not the father of John Brennan, who was going to be a priest of God? She forgave him everything on this account, ev

35、en the coarse and blasphemous expressions he continually let fly from his mouth the while she read for him the most holy stories by Jesuit Fathers. Just now she had given him two shillings with which to entertain himself. He had threatened to strike her in the event of her refusal. That was why she

36、had been sighing and why the tears were now creeping into her great tired eyes as she began to set her machine in motion for the tasks of the day. Dear, dear, wasnt he the cruel, hard man?. Yet beyond all this thought of him was her bright dream of the day when, with the few pounds she had saved so

37、secretly from the wide grasp of his thirst, she must fit him out in a rich suit of black and go by his side proudly to attend the ordination ofPg 3 their son John. It was because she so dearly loved her dream that she bore him with immense patience. Also it was because she had been thinking of that

38、grand day and of the descending splendor of her son that she now commented so strongly upon the passage of the children to school. She had spoken bitterly to her own heart, but in that heart of hers she was a bitter woman. This was such a sunny, lovely morning. It was the day of the June Races in th

39、e town of Mullaghowen, and most of the valley-dwellers had gone there. The winding, dusty road through Tullahanogue was a long lane of silence amid the sunlight. It appeared as an avenue to the Palace of Dreams. So it was not at all strange that Mrs. Brennan was dreaming forward into the future and

40、filling her mind with fancies of the past. She was remembering herself as Nan Byrne, the prettiest girl in the valley. This was no illusion of idle vanity, for was there not an old daguerreotype in an album on the table behind her at this very moment to prove that beauty had been hers? And she had b

41、een ruined because of that proud beauty. It was curious to think how her sister and she had both gone the same way. The period of a generation had passed since the calamity had fallen upon them almost simultaneously. It was the greatest scandal that had ever happened in these parts. The holy priest,

42、 whose bones were now moldering beneath the sanctuary of the chapel, had said hard words of her. From the altar of God he had spoken his pity of her father, and said that she was a bad woman. May God strengthen him, for this is the bitter Pg 4burden to bear. Philip Byrne is a decent man for all his

43、daughter Nan is a woman of shame. I pray you avoid her every one who has the trace of Gods purity in his heart. Let you go not into that house which she has made an abode of lust, nor allow the fair name of your own house to be blemished by the contamination of her presence within its walls. Yes, it

44、 was true that all this had been said of her by the holy father, and in the very spot beneath which his bones were now at rest. They were the hard words surely to have issued from the lips of Gods anointed. Even in the fugitive remembrance of them now they seemed to have left red marks like whip-las

45、h weals across her soul. The burning hurt of them drove her deeper into remembrance. She had already come to the full development of her charms when her ambition had also appeared. It was, in short, to effect the catch of one of the strong farmers of the valley. She entered into conspiracy with her

46、sister and, together, they laid their plans. Henry Shannon was the one upon whom she had set her eye and Loughlin Mulvey the one her sister Bridget had begun to desire. They were both men of family and substance, and hard drinkers after the fashion of the fields. They often called at the house to se

47、e the sisters. Philip Byrne, whose occupation as head-groom at the stables of the Moores of Garradrimna often took him away from Ireland, would always be absent during those visitations. But their mother would be there, Mrs. Abigail Byrne, ambitious for her daughters, in great style. It was never kn

48、own to happen that either of the strong farmers called to the house without a bottle of whiskey. Mrs. Byrne always looked Pg 5favorably upon them for their high decency, and the whiskey was good whiskey. Here in this very room where she now sat remembering it all there had been such scenes! Her hair

49、 had been so thick and brown and there had been a rare bloom upon her skin as she had sat here alone with Henry Shannon, talking with him of queer things and kissing his dark, handsome face. And all through those far, bygone times she used to be thinking of his grand house and of his broad fields and the way she would one day assert herself in the joy of such possessions over her less fortunate sisters o