酷兔英语
    当前位置:
  1. 首页
  2. 文章
  3. 娱乐英语
  4. 原版小说
  5. 正文

The Colour of Life-Part5_Alice Meynell(1847-1924)_English Literature(文学名著)-第2页

0 收藏 0 分享 0 赞

章节正文
文章总共2页
have slept between its encounters. You did sleep. These men were



strong men, and knew what they wanted. It is tremendous to watch

the struggle of such resolves. They had their purpose in their



grasp, their teeth were set, their will was iron. They were foot to

foot.



And next morning you saw by the papers that the secondary, but still

renowned, actor, had succeeded in sharing the principal honours of



the piece. So uncommonly well had he done, even for him. Then you

understood that, though you had not known it, the tragedian must



have been beaten in that dialogue. He had suffered himself in an

instant of weakness, to be stimulated; he had for a moment - only a



moment - got on.

That night was influential. We may see its results everywhere, and



especially in Shakespeare. Our tragic stage was always - well,

different, let us say - different from the tragic stage of Italy and



France. It is now quite unlike, and frankly so. The spoilt

tradition of vitality has been explicitly abandoned. The



interrupted one waits, no longer with a roving eye, but with

something almost of dignity, as though he were fulfilling ritual.



Benvolio and Mercutio outlag one another in hunting after the

leaping Romeo. They call without the slightest impetus. One can



imagine how the true Mercutio called - certainly not by rote. There

must have been pauses indeed, brief and short-breath'd pauses of



listening for an answer, between every nickname. But the nicknames

were quick work. At the Lyceum they were quite an effort of memory:



"Romeo! Humours! Madman! Passion! Lover!"

The actress of Juliet, speaking the words of haste, makes her



audience wait to hear them. Nothing more incongruous than Juliet's

harry of phrase and the actress's leisure of phrasing. None act,



none speak, as though there were such a thing as impulse in a play.

To drop behind is the only idea of arriving. The nurse ceases to be



absurd, for there is no one readier with a reply than she. Or,

rather, her delays are so altered by exaggeration as to lose touch



with Nature. If it is ill enough to hear haste drawled out, it is

ill, too, to hear slowness out-tarried. The true nurse of



Shakespeare lags with her news because her ignorant wits are easily

astray, as lightly caught as though they were light, which they are



not; but the nurse of the stage is never simply astray: she knows

beforehand how long she means to be, and never, never forgets what



kind of race is the race she is riding. The Juliet of the stage

seems to consider that there is plenty of time for her to discover



which is slain - Tybalt or her husband; she is sure to know some

time; it can wait.



A London success, when you know where it lies, is not difficult to

achieve. Of all things that can be gained by men or women about



their business, there is one thing that can be gained without fear

of failure. This is time. To gain time requires so little wit



that, except for competition, every one could be first at the game.

In fact, time gains itself. The actor is really not called upon to



do anything. There is nothing, accordingly, for which our actors

and actresses do not rely upon time. For humour even, when the



humour occurs in tragedy, they appeal to time. They give blanks to

their audiences to be filled up.



It might be possible to have tragedies written from beginning to end

for the service of the present kind of "art." But the tragedies we



have are not so written. And being what they are, it is not

vivacity that they lose by this length of pause, this length of



phrasing, this illimitable tiresomeness; it is life itself. For the

life of a scene conceived directly is its directness; the life of a



scene created simply is its simplicity. And simplicity, directness,

impetus, emotion, nature fall out of the trailing, loose, long



dialogue, like fish from the loose meshes of a net - they fall out,

they drift off, they are lost.






文章总共2页
文章标签:名著  

章节正文
Copyright © 2023 Qeto All rights reserved.
商务合作 | 联系我们 | 关于我们 | 版权声明 | 隐私条款 | 如果智培

京ICP备05059198号-1 京公网安备 11011202003401号