Tài liệu Through The Magic Door (dodo Press) By Sir Arthur Conan Doyle docx

LINK DOWNLOAD MIỄN PHÍ TÀI LIỆU "Tài liệu Through The Magic Door (dodo Press) By Sir Arthur Conan Doyle docx": http://123doc.vn/document/1050311-tai-lieu-through-the-magic-door-dodo-press-by-sir-arthur-conan-doyle-docx.htm

Through the Magic Door
3
Carlyle felt when he hurried home with the six volumes of Gibbon’s
“History” under his arm, his mind just starving for want of food, to
devour them at the rate of one a day? A book should be your very
own before you can really get the taste of it, and unless you have
worked for it, you will never have the true inward pride of
possession.

If I had to choose the one book out of all that line from which I have
had most pleasure and most profit, I should point to yonder stained
copy of Macaulay’s “Essays. “ It seems entwined into my whole life
as I look backwards. It was my comrade in my student days, it has
been with me on the sweltering Gold Coast, and it formed part of my
humble kit when I went a-whaling in the Arctic. Honest Scotch
harpooners have addled their brains over it, and you may still see
the grease stains where the second engineer grappled with Frederick
the Great. Tattered and dirty and worn, no gilt-edged morocco-
bound volume could ever take its place for me.

What a noble gateway this book forms through which one may
approach the study either of letters or of history! Milton, Machiavelli,
Hallam, Southey, Bunyan, Byron, Johnson, Pitt, Hampden, Clive,
Hastings, Chatham—what nuclei for thought! With a good grip of
each how pleasant and easy to fill in all that lies between! The short,
vivid sentences, the broad sweep of allusion, the exact detail, they all
throw a glamour round the subject and should make the least
studious of readers desire to go further. If Macaulay’s hand cannot
lead a man upon those pleasant paths, then, indeed, he may give up
all hope of ever finding them.

When I was a senior schoolboy this book—not this very volume, for
it had an even more tattered predecessor—opened up a new world
to me. History had been a lesson and abhorrent. Suddenly the task
and the drudgery became an incursion into an enchanted land, a
land of colour and beauty, with a kind, wise guide to point the path.
In that great style of his I loved even the faults—indeed, now that I
come to think of it, it was the faults which I loved best. No sentence
could be too stiff with rich embroidery, and no antithesis too
flowery. It pleased me to read that “a universal shout of laughter
from the Tagus to the Vistula informed the Pope that the days of the
crusades were past, “ and I was delighted to learn that “Lady
Jerningham kept a vase in which people placed foolish verses, and
Mr. Dash wrote verses which were fit to be placed in Lady
Jerningham’s vase. “ Those were the kind of sentences which used to
Through the Magic Door
4
fill me with a vague but enduring pleasure, like chords which linger
in the musician’s ear. A man likes a plainer literary diet as he grows
older, but still as I glance over the Essays I am filled with admiration
and wonder at the alternate power of handling a great subject, and of
adorning it by delightful detail—just a bold sweep of the brush, and
then the most delicate stippling. As he leads you down the path, he
for ever indicates the alluring side-tracks which branch away from it.
An admirable, if somewhat old-fashioned, literary and historical
education night be effected by working through every book which is
alluded to in the Essays. I should be curious, however, to know the
exact age of the youth when he came to the end of his studies.

I wish Macaulay had written a historical novel. I am convinced that
it would have been a great one. I do not know if he had the power of
drawing an imaginary character, but he certainly had the gift of
reconstructing a dead celebrity to a remarkable degree. Look at the
simple half-paragraph in which he gives us Johnson and his
atmosphere. Was ever a more definite picture given in a shorter
space—

“As we close it, the club-room is before us, and the table on
which stand the omelet for Nugent, and the lemons for
Johnson. There are assembled those heads which live for
ever on the canvas of Reynolds. There are the spectacles of
Burke, and the tall thin form of Langton, the courtly sneer of
Beauclerk and the beaming smile of Garrick, Gibbon tapping
his snuff-box, and Sir Joshua with his trumpet in his ear. In
the foreground is that strange figure which is as familiar to
us as the figures of those among whom we have been
brought up—the gigantic body, the huge massy face, seamed
with the scars of disease, the brown coat, the black worsted
stockings, the grey wig with the scorched foretop, the dirty
hands, the nails bitten and pared to the quick. We see the
eyes and mouth moving with convulsive twitches; we see
the heavy form rolling; we hear it puffing, and then comes
the ‘Why, sir! ‘ and the ‘What then, sir? ‘ and the ‘No, sir! ‘
and the ‘You don’t see your way through the question, sir! ‘“

It is etched into your memory for ever.

I can remember that when I visited London at the age of sixteen the
first thing I did after housing my luggage was to make a pilgrimage
to Macaulay’s grave, where he lies in Westminster Abbey, just under
Through the Magic Door
5
the shadow of Addison, and amid the dust of the poets whom he
had loved so well. It was the one great object of interest which
London held for me. And so it might well be, when I think of all I
owe him. It is not merely the knowledge and the stimulation of fresh
interests, but it is the charming gentlemanly tone, the broad, liberal
outlook, the general absence of bigotry and of prejudice. My
judgment now confirms all that I felt for him then.

My four-volume edition of the History stands, as you see, to the
right of the Essays. Do you recollect the third chapter of that work—
the one which reconstructs the England of the seventeenth century?
It has always seemed to me the very high-water mark of Macaulay’s
powers, with its marvellous mixture of precise fact and romantic
phrasing. The population of towns, the statistics of commerce, the
prosaic facts of life are all transmuted into wonder and interest by
the handling of the master. You feel that he could have cast a
glamour over the multiplication table had he set himself to do so.
Take a single concrete example of what I mean. The fact that a
Londoner in the country, or a countryman in London, felt equally
out of place in those days of difficult travel, would seem to hardly
require stating, and to afford no opportunity of leaving a strong
impression upon the reader’s mind. See what Macaulay makes of it,
though it is no more than a hundred other paragraphs which discuss
a hundred various points—

“A cockney in a rural village was stared at as much as if he
had intruded into a kraal of Hottentots. On the other hand,
when the lord of a Lincolnshire or Shropshire manor
appeared in Fleet Street, he was as easily distinguished from
the resident population as a Turk or a Lascar. His dress, his
gait, his accent, the manner in which he gazed at the shops,
stumbled into gutters, ran against the porters, and stood
under the waterspouts, marked him out as an excellent
subject for the operations of swindlers and banterers. Bullies
jostled him into the kennel, Hackney coachmen splashed
him from head to foot, thieves explored with perfect security
the huge pockets of his horseman’s coat, while he stood
entranced by the splendour of the Lord Mayor’s Show.
Money-droppers, sore from the cart’s tail, introduced
themselves to him, and appeared to him the most honest
friendly gentlemen that he had ever seen. Painted women,
the refuse of Lewkner Lane and Whetstone Park, passed
themselves on him for countesses and maids of honour. If he
Through the Magic Door
6
asked his way to St. James’, his informants sent him to Mile
End. If he went into a shop, he was instantly discerned to be
a fit purchaser of everything that nobody else would buy, of
second-hand embroidery, copper rings, and watches that
would not go. If he rambled into any fashionable coffee-
house, he became a mark for the insolent derision of fops,
and the grave waggery of Templars. Enraged and mortified,
he soon returned to his mansion, and there, in the homage of
his tenants and the conversation of his boon companions,
found consolation for the vexations and humiliations which
he had undergone. There he was once more a great man, and
saw nothing above himself except when at the assizes he
took his seat on the bench near the Judge, or when at the
muster of the militia he saluted the Lord Lieutenant. “

On the whole, I should put this detached chapter of description at
the very head of his Essays, though it happens to occur in another
volume. The History as a whole does not, as it seems to me, reach the
same level as the shorter articles. One cannot but feel that it is a
brilliant piece of special pleading from a fervid Whig, and that there
must be more to be said for the other side than is there set forth.
Some of the Essays are tinged also, no doubt, by his own political
and religious limitations. The best are those which get right away
into the broad fields of literature and philosophy. Johnson, Walpole,
Madame D’Arblay, Addison, and the two great Indian ones, Clive
and Warren Hastings, are my own favourites. Frederick the Great,
too, must surely stand in the first rank. Only one would I wish to
eliminate. It is the diabolically clever criticism upon Montgomery.
One would have wished to think that Macaulay’s heart was too kind,
and his soul too gentle, to pen so bitter an attack. Bad work will sink
of its own weight. It is not necessary to souse the author as well. One
would think more highly of the man if he had not done that savage
bit of work.

I don’t know why talking of Macaulay always makes me think of
Scott, whose books in a faded, olive-backed line, have a shelf, you
see, of their own. Perhaps it is that they both had so great an
influence, and woke such admiration in me. Or perhaps it is the real
similarity in the minds and characters of the two men. You don’t see
it, you say? Well, just think of Scott’s “Border Ballads, “ and then of
Macaulay’s “Lays. “ The machines must be alike, when the products
are so similar. Each was the only man who could possibly have
written the poems of the other. What swing and dash in both of
Through the Magic Door
7
them! What a love of all that is and noble and martial! So simple, and
yet so strong. But there are minds on which strength and simplicity
are thrown away. They think that unless a thing is obscure it must be
superficial, whereas it is often the shallow stream which is turbid,
and the deep which is clear. Do you remember the fatuous criticism
of Matthew Arnold upon the glorious “Lays, “ where he calls out “is
this poetry? “ after quoting—

“And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds
For the ashes of his fathers
And the Temples of his Gods? “

In trying to show that Macaulay had not the poetic sense he was
really showing that he himself had not the dramatic sense. The
baldness of the idea and of the language had evidently offended
him. But this is exactly where the true merit lies. Macaulay is giving
the rough, blunt words with which a simple-minded soldier appeals
to two comrades to help him in a deed of valour. Any high-flown
sentiment would have been absolutely out of character. The lines are,
I think, taken with their context, admirable ballad poetry, and have
just the dramatic quality and sense which a ballad poet must have.
That opinion of Arnold’s shook my faith in his judgment, and yet I
would forgive a good deal to the man who wrote—

“One more charge and then be dumb,
When the forts of Folly fall,
May the victors when they come
Find my body near the wall. “

Not a bad verse that for one’s life aspiration.

This is one of the things which human society has not yet
understood—the value of a noble, inspiriting text. When it does we
shall meet them everywhere engraved on appropriate places, and
our progress through the streets will be brightened and ennobled by
one continual series of beautiful mental impulses and images,
reflected into our souls from the printed thoughts which meet our
eyes. To think that we should walk with empty, listless minds while
all this splendid material is running to waste. I do not mean mere
Scriptural texts, for they do not bear the same meaning to all, though
what human creature can fail to be spurred onwards by “Work while
it is day, for the night cometh when no man can work. “ But I mean
Through the Magic Door
8
those beautiful thoughts—who can say that they are uninspired
thoughts? —which may be gathered from a hundred authors to
match a hundred uses. A fine thought in fine language is a most
precious jewel, and should not be hid away, but be exposed for use
and ornament. To take the nearest example, there is a horse-trough
across the road from my house, a plain stone trough, and no man
could pass it with any feelings save vague discontent at its ugliness.
But suppose that on its front slab you print the verse of Coleridge—

“He prayeth best who loveth best
All things, both great and small
For the dear Lord who fashioned him
He knows and loveth all. “

I fear I may misquote, for I have not “The Ancient Mariner” at my
elbow, but even as it stands does it not elevate the horse-trough? We
all do this, I suppose, in a small way for ourselves. There are few
men who have not some chosen quotations printed on their study
mantelpieces, or, better still, in their hearts. Carlyle’s transcription of
“Rest! Rest! Shall I not have all Eternity to rest in! “ is a pretty good
spur to a weary man. But what we need is a more general
application of the same thing for public and not for private use, until
people understand that a graven thought is as beautiful an ornament
as any graven image, striking through the eye right deep down into
the soul.

However, all this has nothing to do with Macaulay’s glorious lays,
save that when you want some flowers of manliness and patriotism
you can pluck quite a bouquet out of those. I had the good fortune to
learn the Lay of Horatius off by heart when I was a child, and it
stamped itself on my plastic mind, so that even now I can reel off
almost the whole of it. Goldsmith said that in conversation he was
like the man who had a thousand pounds in the bank, but could not
compete with the man who had an actual sixpence in his pocket. So
the ballad that you bear in your mind outweighs the whole
bookshelf which waits for reference. But I want you now to move
your eye a little farther down the shelf to the line of olive-green
volumes. That is my edition of Scott. But surely I must give you a
little breathing space before I venture upon them.

Through the Magic Door
9

II.

It is a great thing to start life with a small number of really good
books which are your very own. You may not appreciate them at
first. You may pine for your novel of crude and unadulterated
adventure. You may, and will, give it the preference when you can.
But the dull days come, and the rainy days come, and always you
are driven to fill up the chinks of your reading with the worthy
books which wait so patiently for your notice. And then suddenly,
on a day which marks an epoch in your life, you understand the
difference. You see, like a flash, how the one stands for nothing, and
the other for literature. From that day onwards you may return to
your crudities, but at least you do so with some standard of
comparison in your mind. You can never be the same as you were
before. Then gradually the good thing becomes more dear to you; it
builds itself up with your growing mind; it becomes a part of your
better self, and so, at last, you can look, as I do now, at the old covers
and love them for all that they have meant in the past. Yes, it was the
olive-green line of Scott’s novels which started me on to rhapsody.
They were the first books I ever owned—long, long before I could
appreciate or even understand them. But at last I realized what a
treasure they were. In my boyhood I read them by surreptitious
candle-ends in the dead of the night, when the sense of crime added
a new zest to the story. Perhaps you have observed that my
“Ivanhoe” is of a different edition from the others. The first copy was
left in the grass by the side of a stream, fell into the water, and was
eventually picked up three days later, swollen and decomposed,
upon a mud-bank. I think I may say, however, that I had worn it out
before I lost it. Indeed, it was perhaps as well that it was some years
before it was replaced, for my instinct was always to read it again
instead of breaking fresh ground.

I remember the late James Payn telling the anecdote that he and two
literary friends agreed to write down what scene in fiction they
thought the most dramatic, and that on examining the papers it was
found that all three had chosen the same. It was the moment when
the unknown knight, at Ashby-de-la-Zouch, riding past the pavilions
of the lesser men, strikes with the sharp end of his lance, in a
challenge to mortal combat, the shield of the formidable Templar. It
was, indeed, a splendid moment! What matter that no Templar was
allowed by the rules of his Order to take part in so secular and
frivolous an affair as a tournament? It is the privilege of great
Through the Magic Door
10
masters to make things so, and it is a churlish thing to gainsay it.
Was it not Wendell Holmes who described the prosaic man, who
enters a drawing-room with a couple of facts, like ill-conditioned
bull-dogs at his heels, ready to let them loose on any play of fancy?
The great writer can never go wrong. If Shakespeare gives a sea-
coast to Bohemia, or if Victor Hugo calls an English prize-fighter Mr.
Jim-John-Jack—well, it was so, and that’s an end of it. “There is no
second line of rails at that point, “ said an editor to a minor author. “I
make a second line, “ said the author; and he was within his rights, if
he can carry his readers’ conviction with him.

But this is a digression from “Ivanhoe. “ What a book it is! The
second greatest historical novel in our language, I think. Every
successive reading has deepened my admiration for it. Scott’s
soldiers are always as good as his women (with exceptions) are
weak; but here, while the soldiers are at their very best, the romantic
figure of Rebecca redeems the female side of the story from the usual
commonplace routine. Scott drew manly men because he was a
manly man himself, and found the task a sympathetic one.

He drew young heroines because a convention demanded it, which
he had never the hardihood to break. It is only when we get him for
a dozen chapters on end with a minimum of petticoat—in the long
stretch, for example, from the beginning of the Tournament to the
end of the Friar Tuck incident—that we realize the height of
continued romantic narrative to which he could attain. I don’t think
in the whole range of our literature we have a finer sustained flight
than that.

There is, I admit, an intolerable amount of redundant verbiage in
Scott’s novels. Those endless and unnecessary introductions make
the shell very thick before you come to the oyster. They are often
admirable in themselves, learned, witty, picturesque, but with no
relation or proportion to the story which they are supposed to
introduce. Like so much of our English fiction, they are very good
matter in a very bad place. Digression and want of method and
order are traditional national sins. Fancy introducing an essay on
how to live on nothing a year as Thackeray did in “Vanity Fair, “ or
sandwiching in a ghost story as Dickens has dared to do. As well
might a dramatic author rush up to the footlights and begin telling
anecdotes while his play was suspending its action and his
characters waiting wearily behind him. It is all wrong, though every
great name can be quoted in support of it. Our sense of form is
Through the Magic Door
11
lamentably lacking, and Sir Walter sinned with the rest. But get past
all that to a crisis in the real story, and who finds the terse phrase,
the short fire-word, so surely as he? Do you remember when the
reckless Sergeant of Dragoons stands at last before the grim Puritan,
upon whose head a price has been set: “A thousand marks or a bed
of heather! “ says he, as he draws. The Puritan draws also: “The
Sword of the Lord and of Gideon! “ says he. No verbiage there! But
the very spirit of either man and of either party, in the few stern
words, which haunt your mind. “Bows and Bills! “ cry the Saxon
Varangians, as the Moslem horse charges home. You feel it is just
what they must have cried. Even more terse and businesslike was
the actual battle-cry of the fathers of the same men on that long-
drawn day when they fought under the “Red Dragon of Wessex” on
the low ridge at Hastings. “Out! Out! “ they roared, as the Norman
chivalry broke upon them. Terse, strong, prosaic—the very genius of
the race was in the cry.

Is it that the higher emotions are not there? Or is it that they are
damped down and covered over as too precious to be exhibited?
Something of each, perhaps. I once met the widow of the man who,
as a young signal midshipman, had taken Nelson’s famous message
from the Signal Yeoman and communicated it to the ship’s company.
The officers were impressed. The men were not. “Duty! “ they
muttered. “We’ve always done it. Why not? “ Anything in the least
highfalutin’ would depress, not exalt, a British company. It is the
under statement which delights them. German troops can march to
battle singing Luther’s hymns. Frenchmen will work themselves into
a frenzy by a song of glory and of Fatherland. Our martial poets
need not trouble to imitate—or at least need not imagine that if they
do so they will ever supply a want to the British soldier. Our sailors
working the heavy guns in South Africa sang: “Here’s another lump
of sugar for the Bird. “ I saw a regiment go into action to the refrain
of “A little bit off the top. “ The martial poet aforesaid, unless he had
the genius and the insight of a Kipling, would have wasted a good
deal of ink before he had got down to such chants as these. The
Russians are not unlike us in this respect. I remember reading of
some column ascending a breach and singing lustily from start to
finish, until a few survivors were left victorious upon the crest with
the song still going. A spectator inquired what wondrous chant it
was which had warmed them to such a deed of valour, and he found
that the exact meaning of the words, endlessly repeated, was “Ivan is
in the garden picking cabbages. “ The fact is, I suppose, that a mere
Through the Magic Door
12
monotonous sound may take the place of the tom-tom of savage
warfare, and hypnotize the soldier into valour.

Our cousins across the Atlantic have the same blending of the comic
with their most serious work. Take the songs which they sang
during the most bloody war which the Anglo-Celtic race has ever
waged—the only war in which it could have been said that they
were stretched to their uttermost and showed their true form—
”Tramp, tramp, tramp, “ “John Brown’s Body, “ “Marching through
Georgia”—all had a playful humour running through them. Only
one exception do I know, and that is the most tremendous war-song
I can recall. Even an outsider in time of peace can hardly read it
without emotion. I mean, of course, Julia Ward Howe’s “War-Song
of the Republic, “ with the choral opening line: “Mine eyes have seen
the glory of the coming of the Lord. “ If that were ever sung upon a
battle-field the effect must have been terrific.

A long digression, is it not? But that is the worst of the thoughts at
the other side of the Magic Door. You can’t pull one out without a
dozen being entangled with it. But it was Scott’s soldiers that I was
talking of, and I was saying that there is nothing theatrical, no
posing, no heroics (the thing of all others which the hero
abominates), but just the short bluff word and the simple manly
ways, with every expression and metaphor drawn from within his
natural range of thought. What a pity it is that he, with his keen
appreciation of the soldier, gave us so little of those soldiers who
were his own contemporaries—the finest, perhaps, that the world
has ever seen! It is true that he wrote a life of the great Soldier
Emperor, but that was the one piece of hackwork of his career. How
could a Tory patriot, whose whole training had been to look upon
Napoleon as a malignant Demon, do justice to such a theme? But the
Europe of those days was full of material which he of all men could
have drawn with a sympathetic hand. What would we not give for a
portrait of one of Murat’s light-cavalrymen, or of a Grenadier of the
Old Guard, drawn with the same bold strokes as the Rittmeister of
Gustavus or the archers of the French King’s Guard in “Quentin
Durward”?

In his visit to Paris Scott must have seen many of those iron men
who during the preceding twenty years had been the scourge and
also the redemption of Europe. To us the soldiers who scowled at
him from the sidewalks in 1814 would have been as interesting and
as much romantic figures of the past as the mail-clad knights or