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Letteratura Inglese I - 2010-2011
Lingue e Letterature Straniere (curricula Lett – Ling – Art, ED) - S. Bigliazzi
N.B. le dispense non sostituiscono la lettura integrale dei seguenti testi primari in programma
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Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886)
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890)
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1899), The Duel (1908), The Secret Sharer (1909)
Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier (1915)
Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (1925);
T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, in Prufrock and Other Observations (1917), in R. Sanesi
(a cura di), Poesie, Milano, Bompiani, 1983; Hamlet (1919), Tradition and the Individual Talent (1921)
in Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot, ed. by F. Kermode, London, Faber, 1975, pp. 37-49.
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Il mito di Narciso (Ovidio, Metamorfosi, III)
Narciso [figlio del dio-fiume Cefiso, dopo aver deluso la ninfa Eco, che perciò decide di restare
nascosta nelle selve senza che si possa vedere allo scoperto] intanto continuava a prendersi gioco delle ninfe
come aveva fatto con lei; ne aveva deluse alcune nate dal mare, altre sui monti. E prima la stessa sorte era
toccata ai compagni di sesso maschile. Uno degli sfortunati colpiti dal suo disprezzo aveva levato al cielo le
mani, esclamando: «Possa egli amare con altrettanta intensità e non possedere l’amato!» Alle sue preghiere
assentì la dea [Nemesi] di Ramnunte.
V’era una fonte che splendeva come argento liquido, non contaminata dal fango, a cui mai avevano
attinto i pastori né si erano abbeverate le capre o altre greggi dopo il pascolo montano; mai era stata sfiorata
da un uccello né turbata da una fiera o dalla caduta di un ramo da un albero. Intorno vi cresceva l’erba,
alimentata dalla vicinanza delle acque, e c’era un bosco fitto e fresco che non lasciava passare nemmeno un
raggio di sole. Giunto qui il ragazzo, stanco per aver cacciato con impegno sotto la calura, si butta bocconi
per immergersi nella bellezza del luogo e per accostarsi alla fonte: e mentre cerca di soddisfare la sete,
gliene cresce un’altra dentro.
Beve e vede il riflesso della sua bella persona nell’acqua: ne è preso e si innamora di un’illusione che
non ha corpo, pensando che sia corpo quello che non è altro che onda. È stupito e attratto da se stesso e
resta immobile senza battere ciglio come una statua di marmo Pario. Steso a terra contempla il suo gemello,
i suoi occhi, due stelle, la chioma che sarebbe degna di Bacco e perfino di Apollo, le guance imberbi, il
collo d’avorio, la nobiltà del volto col suo colore bianco e rosa: insomma ammira tutti quei particolari che
rendono lui stesso degno di ammirazione. Senza saperlo si innamora di sé e si applaude; è
contemporaneamente soggetto e oggetto del desiderio, accende il fuoco e ne è arso. Quanti baci vani dà alla
fonte! Quante volte immerge nell’acqua le braccia per cingere quello che gli appare: ma non riesce ad
allacciarlo. Non sa chi sia quello che vede, ma brucia per lui ed è quella falsa immagine che eccita i suoi
occhi. Ingenuo, perché ti affanni a cercar di afferrare un’ombra [simulacra] che ti sfugge? Non esiste quello
che cerchi! Voltati e perderai chi ami!Quello che vedi non è che un tenue riflesso [imagini umbras]: non ha
alcuna consistenza. E viene con te, resta con te, se ne andrà con te, ammesso che tu riesca ad andartene!
Ma nulla lo smuove di lì: non bisogno di cibo, non di sonno; abbandonato sull’erba all’ombra,
contempla insaziabilmente quell’immagine menzognera [mendacem lumine formam] e si strugge attraverso
i propri occhi. Poi, si solleva così un po’, tende le braccia alle selve che lo circondano, chiedendo loro: «Ci
fu mai, o selve, qualcuno che soffrì d’un amore più crudele del mio? Voi certo lo sapete perché siete servite
da rifugio a molti, quando ne avevano bisogno. Voi che siete così vetuste, ricordate di aver mai visto, nel
corso della vostra lunga vita, qualcuno che così si sia consumato? Sono innamorato e vedo l’oggetto del
mio amore ma non riesco ad afferrarlo: fino a tal punto l’amore mi lusinga e mi confonde! E per maggior
disappunto, non è l’immenso mare a separarci, né un lungo cammino, né i monti, né le porte sbarrate di una
cinta di mura, bensì solo poca acqua. Anche lui desidera il mio abbraccio! Tutte le volte che mi sporgo per
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dare baci alla limpida corrente, lui si sforza di raggiungermi, con la bocca rivolta verso la mia: si direbbe
ch’io possa toccarlo. È un nulla quello che si frappone al nostro amore! Fanciullo, chiunque tu sia, esci fuori
e vieni qui! Perché mi deludi, mio unico amore, e dove te ne fuggi quando io ti desidero? Non è certo il mio
aspetto, non la mia età a farti fuggire: altrimenti le ninfe non mi avrebbero amato. Il tuo volto amichevole
mi induce a ben sperare e quando io tendo le braccia lo fai anche tu spontaneamente; quando sorrido mi
ricambi il sorriso; spesso ti ho anche visto piangere quando io piangevo e così ti ho visto rispondermi a
cenni. Addirittura, per quanto posso capire dal movimento delle tue labbra, mi rimandi delle parole: ma
queste non giungono al mio orecchio. Ma allora è chiaro! Quello che amo sono io stesso [iste ego sum]!
Non mi inganna più la mia immagine! Brucio d’amore per me stesso e sono io ad accendere il fuoco che mi
divora. E adesso che devo fare? Devo farmi pregare o devo pregare? Ma poi che cosa posso chiedere?
Quello che bramo è in me [mecum est]: l’aver troppo mi ha reso povero. Oh! Potessi separarmi dal mio
corpo! Sto formulando un voto inaudito per un amante: vorrei che l’oggetto del mio amore fosse lontano!
Ma ormai il dolore mi toglie le forze e non ho più molto tempo da vivere: muoio nel fior della giovinezza!
Del resto la morte non mi spaventa, se con essa cesserò di soffrire: solo vorrei che l’essere che amo mi
sopravvivesse. Invece noi due all’unisono ci estingueremo in un unico sospiro!»
Dopo questo sfogo ritorna, nella sua follia, a contemplare come prima quel volto e sconvolge lo
specchio d’acqua con le sue lacrime, tanto da confondere l’immagine riflessa. Al vederla sparire grida:
«Dove te ne fuggi? Resta, crudele, e non abbandonare chi ti ama! Se non posso toccarti, ch’io possa almeno
vederti e accontentare così la mia infelice passione!». E in preda al dolore tira giù il lembo superiore della
veste e con le bianche mani si percuote il petto: questo, sotto i colpi, si arrossa leggermente proprio come
fanno le mele, bianche da una parte, rosse dall’altra, o come fa l’uva non ancora completamente matura, i
cui grappoli cominciano a rivestirsi di un bel rosso porporino. Non appena Narciso scorge questo fenomeno
nell’acqua, ritornata limpida, non sa più resistere: ma come la bionda cera si scioglie a una leggera fiamma
o come svanisce al sole la brina mattutina, così il giovane, macerato dall’amore, si dissolve, bruciando
lentamente del fuoco nascosto. E già non ha più colore, nemmeno quel po’ di roseo misto al pallore, né
vitalità, né forza: nulla più di quella bellezza che testé gli piaceva contemplare. Non resta più quel corpo
che una volta Eco aveva amato.
Costei, quando lo vide così, per quanto ancora memore dell’affronto e corrucciata, ne provò dolore, e
tutte le volte che il giovinetto diceva lamentosamente «Ohimè!» ripeteva il gemito con la sua voce
risonante. E quando egli con le mani si percuoteva le braccia, lei riproduceva, identico, il suono dei colpi.
Le ultime parole di Narciso, sempre fisso a guardare verso l’acqua, furono: «Ohimè! Fanciullo invano
amato!» e il luogo circostante le ripercosse. Al suo «Addio!» rispose l’addio di Eco. Egli reclinò il capo
spossato sull’erba verde e la morte sigillò quegli occhi che ancora contemplavano la bellezza di chi le
possedeva. E anche quando fu accolto giù, nella sede infera, non smise di rimirarsi nell’acqua dello Stige.
Lo compiansero le sorelle Naiadi e si tagliarono ciocche di capelli per offrirle al fratello; lo compiansero
anche le Driadi ed Eco accompagnava il loro lamento. E già apprestavano il rogo e si preparavano ad
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agitare le fiaccole e a trasportare il corpo, quando si accorsero che quello non c’era più. Trovarono al suo
posto uno fiore col cuore color di croco cinto da petali bianchi.
Il mito di Ermafrodito (Ovidio, Metamorfosi, IV)
«Fate, o dei, che mai costui si stacchi da me né io da lui!» Gli dei lo ascoltarono. I due corpi si
congiunsero e compenetrarono tanto da assumere un unico aspetto. Come quando si racchiudono due rami
in un’unica corteccia, si verifica poi che col crescere via via si congiungono e si sviluppano insieme, così
quelli, avvinti nel tenace amplesso, non erano più due ma un corpo doppio, che non poteva essere definito
né maschio né femmina e non somigliava a nessuno dei due in particolare ma a tutti e due.
Quando dunque Ermafrodito si rese conto che le onde in cui si era tuffato come maschio lo avevano
reso un mezzo uomo, rammollendo le sue membra, protese le mani ed esclamò, con una voce che non era
già più virile: «O padre, o madre, esaudite la grazia che vi chiede il figlio che porta il nome di tutti e due!
Fate che qualunque maschio venga a questa fonte, ne esca uomo solo a metà e si rammollisca al contatto di
quest’acqua!» Commossi dalle parole del figlio biforme i genitori lo esaudirono e avvelenarono la fonte con
un equivoco filtro.»
Da Il perturbante (1919) di S. Freud
[…] [Hoffmann] È un maestro ineguagliato del perturbante nell’ambito della letteratura. Il suo
racconto Gli elisir del diavolo rivela un complesso garbuglio di motivi romanzeschi ai quali saremmo tentati
di attribuire l’effetto perturbante che scaturisce dalla narrazione. Il contenuto del racconto è troppo denso e
intricato per tentare di darne un riassunto. Alla fine del racconto, quando al lettore vengono illustrate le
premesse dell’azione che fino a quel momento erano state tenute celate, ciò che ne risulta per lui non è una
delucidazione bensì uno stato di completo smarrimento. Il narratore ha ammassato troppe cose simili fra
loro, e benché l’impressione esercitata dall’insieme non ne soffra, ne soffre invece la comprensione.
Bisogna accontentarsi di estrarre, tra i motivi che esercitano un effetto perturbante, quelli di maggior
rilievo, per indagare se anch’essi possano esser ricondotti a fonti infantili. Tali sono il motivo del “sosia” in
tutte le sue gradazioni e configurazioni, ossia la comparsa di personaggi che, presentandosi col medesimo
aspetto, debbono venire considerati identici; l’accentuazione di questo rapporto mediante la trasmissione
immediata di processi psichici dall’una all’altra di queste persone – fenomeno che noi chiamiamo telepatia
– così che l’una è compartecipe della conoscenza, dei sentimenti e delle esperienze dell’altra;
l’identificazione del soggetto con un’altra persona sì che egli dubita del proprio Io e lo sostituisce con
quello della persona estranea; un raddoppiamento dell’Io, quindi una suddivisione dell’Io, una permuta
dell’Io;un motivo del genere è infine il perpetuo ritorno dell’uguale, la ripetizione degli stessi tratti del
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volto, degli stessi caratteri, degli stessi destini, delle stesse imprese delittuose, e perfino degli stessi nomi
attraverso più generazioni che si susseguono.
Il motivo del sosia è stato oggetto di un esame approfondito in un lavoro omonimo di Otto Rank [Der
Doppelgänger, 1914]. Si indagano colà le relazioni tra il sosia e l’immagine riprodotta dallo specchio, tra il
sosia e l’ombra, il genio tutelare, la credenza nell’anima e la paura della morte, ma anche si mette
chiaramente in luce la sorprendente storia dell’evoluzione di questo motivo. Il sosia rappresentava infatti, in
origine, un baluardo contro la scomparsa dell’Io, una energica smentita del potere della morte» (Rank), e
probabilmente il primo sosia del corpo fu l’anima «immortale». La creazione di un simile doppione, come
difesa dell’annientamento, trova riscontro in quella raffigurazione del linguaggio onirico che ama esprimere
la evirazione mediante raddoppiamento o moltiplicazione del simbolo genitale: essa diventa nella civiltà
dell’antico Egitto, la spinta all’arte di modellare l’immagine del defunto in un materiale che duri nel tempo.
Ma queste rappresentazioni sono sorte sul terreno dell’amore illimitato per se stessi, del narcisismo primario
che domina la vita psichica sia del bambino che dell’uomo primitivo, e,col superamento di questa fase,
muta il segno del sosia, da assicurazione di sopravvivenza esso diventa un perturbante presentimento di
morte.
La rappresentazione del sosia non scompare necessariamente insieme con questo narcisismo ei
primordi; essa può acquisire infatti un contenuto nuovo traendolo dalle fasi di sviluppo successive dell’Io.
Nell’Io prende forma lentamente un’istanza particolare, capace di opporsi al resto dell’Io, un’istanza che
serve all’autosservazione e all’autocritica, che effettua il lavoro della censura psichica e che ci diventa nota
come «coscienza morale». Nel caso patologico del delirio di essere osservati questa istanza si isola, si
scinde dall’Io, diventa osservabile da parte del medico. Il fatto che esista una istanza del genere, che può
trattare il resto dell’Io come un oggetto, il fatto cioè che l’uomo sia capace di autosservazione, consente di
conferire un nuovo contenuto alla vecchia rappresentazione del sosia e di assegnarle compiti diversi e
disparati, in primo luogo tutto ciò che all’autocritica appare come appartenente all’antico e superato
narcisismo dei tempo remoti.
Comunque, nell’idea del sosia, accanto a questo contenuto che la critica dell’Io reputa sconveniente,
possono essere incorporate ogni sorta di possibilità non realizzate che il destino potrebbe tenere in serbo e
alle quali la fantasia vuole ancora aggrapparsi, e inoltre tutte le aspirazioni dell’Io che per sfavorevoli
circostanze esterne non hanno potuto realizzarsi, oltre a tutte le decisioni della volontà che sono state
represse e che hanno prodotto l’illusione del libero arbitrio.
Tuttavia, dopo aver considerato la motivazione manifesta della figura del sosia, dobbiamo dirci che
niente di tutto ciò ci rende comprensibile il senso di straordinario turbamento che promana da tale figura;
inoltre, in base alla nostra conoscenza dei processi patologici della psiche, possiamo aggiungere che niente
di questo contenuto potrebbe spiegare la tendenza difensiva mediante la quale esso viene proiettato fuori
dell’Io come un che di estraneo. Dunque, il carattere perturbante del sosia, può trarre origine soltanto dal
fatto che il sosia stesso è una formazione appartenente a tempi psichici remoti e ormai superati, nei quali
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tale formazione aveva un significato più amichevole. Il sosia è diventato uno spauracchio così come gli dèi,
dopo la caduta della loro religione, si sono trasformati in demoni.
[…]
L’effetto perturbante del mal caduco e della follia ha la stessa origine. Il profano vede qui
l’estrinsecazione di forze che non aveva supposto di trovare nel suo prossimo, ma di cui è in grado di
percepire oscuramente la presenza in angoli remoti della propria personalità. Con spirito consequenziale e
sostanzialmente corretto dal punto di vista psicologico, il Medioevo aveva attribuito tutte queste
manifestazioni morbose all’azione di dèmoni. E certo non mi stupirei di sentir dire che la psicoanalisi, la
quale mira a mettere in luce queste forze occulte, è diventata a cagione di ciò essa stessa perturbante per
molte persone. In un caso in cui riuscii a guarire una ragazza inferma da molti anni – eppure la guarigione
non fu molto rapida – ho sentito dire io stesso una cosa del genere dalla madre della ragazza molto tempo
dopo la guarigione della figlia.
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ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON (1850-1894), The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886)
1) Incipit:
MR. UTTERSON the lawyer was a man of a rugged countenance, that was never lighted by a smile; cold,
scanty and embarrassed in discourse; backward in sentiment; lean, long, dusty, dreary, and yet somehow
lovable. At friendly meetings, and when the wine was to his taste, something eminently human beaconed
from his eye; something indeed which never found its way into his talk, but which spoke not only in these
silent symbols of the after-dinner face, but more often and loudly in the acts of his life. He was austere with
himself; drank gin when he was alone, to mortify a taste for vintages; and though he enjoyed the theatre, had
not crossed the doors of one for twenty years. But he had an approved tolerance for others; sometimes
wondering, almost with envy, at the high pressure of spirits involved in their misdeeds; and in any extremity
inclined to help rather than to reprove.
2) UTTERSON: CODICE ETICO
It was his custom of a Sunday, when this meal was over, to sit close by the fire, a volume of some dry
divinity on his reading-desk, until the clock of the neighbouring church rang out the hour of twelve, when he
would go soberly and gratefully to bed.
This document [il testamento di Jekyll] had long been the lawyer's eyesore. It offended him both as a lawyer
and as a lover of the sane and customary sides of life, to whom the fanciful was the immodest.
3) HYDE e JEKYLL
I have observed that when I wore the semblance of Edward Hyde, none could come near to me at first
without a visible misgiving of the flesh. This, as I take it, was because all human beings, as we meet them,
are commingled out of good and evil: and Edward Hyde, alone in the ranks of mankind, was pure evil.
Enough, then, that I not only recognised my natural body for the mere aura and effulgence of certain of the
powers that made up my spirit, but managed to compound a drug by which these powers should be dethroned
from their supremacy, and a second form and countenance substituted, none the less natural to me because
they were the expression, and bore the stamp, of lower elements in my soul.
4) HYDE
a. Enfield:
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It sounds nothing to hear, but it was hellish to see. It wasn't like a man; it was like some damned Juggernaut.
I gave a view-halloa, took to my heels, collared my gentleman, and brought him back to where there was
already quite a group about the screaming child. He was perfectly cool and made no resistance, but gave me
one look, so ugly that it brought out the sweat on me like running.
"He is not easy to describe. There is something wrong with his appearance; something displeasing,
something downright detestable. I never saw a man I so disliked, and yet I scarce know why. He must be
deformed somewhere; he gives a strong feeling of deformity, although I couldn't specify the point. He's an
extraordinary-looking man, and yet I really can name nothing out of the way. No, sir; I can make no hand of
it; I can't describe him. And it's not want of memory; for I declare I can see him this moment."
b. Utterson:
Mr. Hyde was pale and dwarfish, he gave an impression of deformity without any nameable malformation,
he had a displeasing smile, he had borne himself to the lawyer with a sort of murderous mixture of timidity
and boldness, and he spoke with a husky, whispering and somewhat broken voice; all these were points
against him, but not all of these together could explain the hitherto unknown disgust, loathing, and fear with
which Mr. Utterson regarded him. "There must be something else," said the perplexed gentleman. "There is
something more, if I could find a name for it. God bless me, the man seems hardly human! Something
troglodytic, shall we say? or can it be the old story of Dr. Fell? or is it the mere radiance of a foul soul that
thus transpires through, and transfigures, its clay continent? The last, I think; for, O my poor old Harry
Jekyll, if ever I read Satan's signature upon a face, it is on that of your new friend."
c. Lanyon:
I was struck besides with the shocking expression of his face, with his remarkable combination of great
muscular activity and great apparent debility of constitution, and—last but not least— with the odd,
subjective disturbance caused by his neighbourhood. This bore some resemblance to incipient rigour, and
was accompanied by a marked sinking of the pulse. At the time, I set it down to some idiosyncratic, personal
distaste, and merely wondered at the acuteness of the symptoms; but I have since had reason to believe the
cause to lie much deeper in the nature of man, and to turn on some nobler hinge than the principle of hatred.
This person (who had thus, from the first moment of his entrance, struck in me what I can only describe as a
disgustful curiosity) was dressed in a fashion that would have made an ordinary person laughable; his
clothes, that is to say, although they were of rich and sober fabric, were enormously too large for him in
every measurement—the trousers hanging on his legs and rolled up to keep them from the ground, the waist
of the coat below his haunches, and the collar sprawling wide upon his shoulders. Strange to relate, this
ludicrous accoutrement was far from moving me to laughter. Rather, as there was something abnormal and
misbegotten in the very essence of the creature that now faced me— something seizing, surprising, and
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revolting—this fresh disparity seemed but to fit in with and to reinforce it; so that to my interest in the man's
nature and character, there was added a curiosity as to his origin, his life, his fortune and status in the world.
d. “Particularly small and particularly wicked-looking”
e. Jekyll:
Evil besides (which I must still believe to be the lethal side of man) had left on that body an imprint of
deformity and decay.
[…] he thought of Hyde, for all his energy of life, as of something not only hellish but inorganic. This was
the shocking thing; that the slime of the pit seemed to utter cries and voices; that the amorphous dust
gesticulated and sinned; that what was dead, and had no shape, should usurp the offices of life. And this
again, that that insurgent horror was knit to him closer than a wife, closer than an eye; lay caged in his flesh,
where he heard it mutter and felt it struggle to be born; and at every hour of weakness, and in the confidence
of slumber, prevailed against him and deposed him out of life.
5) LA LETTERA DI SPIEGAZIONE = fabula
a) CONSAPEVOLEZZA DELLA ‘DUPLICITY OF LIFE’:
I WAS born in the year 18—- to a large fortune, endowed besides with excellent parts, inclined by nature to
industry, fond of the respect of the wise and good among my fellow-men, and thus, as might have been
supposed, with every guarantee of an honourable and distinguished future. And indeed the worst of my faults
was a certain impatient gaiety of disposition, such as has made the happiness of many, but such as I found it
hard to reconcile with my imperious desire to carry my head high, and wear a more than commonly grave
countenance before the public. Hence it came about that I concealed my pleasures; and that when I reached
years of reflection, and began to look round me and take stock of my progress and position in the world, I
stood already committed to a profound duplicity of life. Many a man would have even blazoned such
irregularities as I was guilty of; but from the high views that I had set before me, I regarded and hid them
with an almost morbid sense of shame.
b) NECESSITÀ DI ADERIRE A UN MODELLO ETICO IRREPRENSIBILE (= Utterson)
It was thus rather the exacting nature of my aspirations than any particular degradation in my faults, that
made me what I was and, with even a deeper trench than in the majority of men, severed in me those
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provinces of good and ill which divide and compound man's dual nature. In this case, I was driven to reflect
deeply and inveterately on that hard law of life, which lies at the root of religion and is one of the most
plentiful springs of distress.
c) SCIENZA COME STRUMENTO DI CONOSCENZA DELL’UOMO:
Though so profound a double-dealer, I was in no sense a hypocrite; both sides of me were in dead earnest; I
was no more myself when I laid aside restraint and plunged in shame, than when I laboured, in the eye of
day, at the furtherance of knowledge or the relief of sorrow and suffering. And it chanced that the direction
of my scientific studies, which led wholly toward the mystic and the transcendental, re-acted and shed a
strong light on this consciousness of the perennial war among my members. With every day, and from both
sides of my intelligence, the moral and the intellectual, I thus drew steadily nearer to that truth, by whose
partial discovery I have been doomed to such a dreadful shipwreck: that man is not truly one, but truly two. I
say two, because the state of my own knowledge does not pass beyond that point. Others will follow, others
will outstrip me on the same lines; and I hazard the guess that man will be ultimately known for a mere polity
of multifarious, incongruous, and independent denizens. I, for my part, from the nature of my life, advanced
infallibly in one direction and in one direction only. It was on the moral side, and in my own person, that I
learned to recognise the thorough and primitive duality of man; I saw that, of the two natures that contended
in the field of my consciousness, even if I could rightly be said to be either, it was only because I was
radically both; and from an early date, even before the course of my scientific discoveries had begun to
suggest the most naked possibility of such a miracle, I had learned to dwell with pleasure, as a beloved daydream, on the thought of the separation of these elements. If each, I told myself, could but be housed in
separate identities, life would be relieved of all that was unbearable; the unjust delivered from the aspirations
might go his way, and remorse of his more upright twin; and the just could walk steadfastly and securely on
his upward path, doing the good things in which he found his pleasure, and no longer exposed to disgrace
and penitence by the hands of this extraneous evil. It was the curse of mankind that these incongruous fagots
were thus bound together that in the agonised womb of consciousness, these polar twins should be
continuously struggling. How, then, were they dissociated?
d) Lo ‘UPRIGHT TWIN’
He had now seen the full deformity of that creature that shared with him some of the phenomena of
consciousness, and was co-heir with him to death: and beyond these links of community, which in
themselves made the most poignant part of his distress, he thought of Hyde, for all his energy of life, as of
something not only hellish but inorganic. This was the shocking thing; that the slime of the pit seemed to
utter cries and voices; that the amorphous dust gesticulated and sinned; that what was dead, and had no
shape, should usurp the offices of life. And this again, that insurgent horror was knit to him closer than a
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wife, closer than an eye; lay caged in his flesh, where he heard it mutter and felt it struggle to be born; and at
every hour of weakness, and in the confidence of slumber, prevailed against him and deposed him out of life.
The hatred of Hyde for Jekyll, was of a different order.]
e) HYDE COME RISVOLTO ISTITUALE PROFONDO di Jekyll:
aI felt younger, lighter, happier in body; within I was conscious of a heady recklessness, a current of
disordered sensual images running like a mill-race in my fancy, a solution of the bonds of obligation, an
unknown but not an innocent freedom of the soul. I knew myself, at the first breath of this new life, to be
more wicked, tenfold more wicked, sold a slave to my original evil; and the thought, in that moment, braced
and delighted me like wine. I stretched out my hands, exulting in the freshness of these sensations; and in the
act, I was suddenly aware that I had lost in stature.
bThe pleasures which I made haste to seek in my disguise were, as I have said, undignified; I would scarce
use a harder term. But in the hands of Edward Hyde, they soon began to turn toward the monstrous. When I
would come back from these excursions, I was often plunged into a kind of wonder at my vicarious
depravity. This familiar that I called out of my own soul, and sent forth alone to do his good pleasure, was a
being inherently malign and villainous; his every act and thought centred on self; drinking pleasure with
bestial avidity from any degree of torture to another; relentless like a man of stone.
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OSCAR WILDE (1854-1900)
L’ARTE PER L’ARTE E ILSOCIALISMO
1) The Critic as Artist (1890):
“Dialogue, certainly, that wonderful literary form which from Plato to Lucian, and from Lucian to Giordano
Bruno, and from Bruno to that grand old Pagan in whom Carlyle took such delight, the creative critics of
the world have always employed, can never lose for the thinker its attraction as a mode of expression. By its
means he can both reveal and conceal himself, and give form to every fancy, and reality to every mood. By
its means he can exhibit the object from each point of view, and show it to us in the round, as a sculptor
shows us things, gaining in this manner all the richness and reality of effect that comes from those side
issues that are suddenly suggested by the central idea in its progress, and really illumine the idea more
completely, or from those felicitous after-thoughts that give a fuller completeness to the central scheme, and
yet convey something of the delicate charm of chance”.
1) aforismi: Ernest: “I dislike modern memoirs. They are generally written by people who have either
entirely lost their memories (paradosso costruito su una figura etimologica), or have never done anything
worth remembering (paradosso); which, however, is, no doubt, the true explanation of their popularity, as
the English public always feels perfectly at its ease when a mediocrity (paradosso con inversione
assiologica) is talking to”.
Gilbert: “As for modern journalism, it is not my business to defend it. It justifies its own existence by
the great Darwinian principle of the survival of the vulgarest (citazione ironica). I have merely to do with
literature (ironia)”
… E. “What is the difference between literature and journalism?” G.:“Oh! Journalism is unreadable, and
literature is not read (antitesi)”
… G. “to give an accurate description of what has never occurred (paradosso) is not merely the proper
occupation of the historian, but the inalienable privilege of any man of parts and culture. Still less I desire to
talk learnedly. Learned conversation is either the affectation of the ignorant (paradosso) or the profession of
the mentally unemployed (paradosso). And, as for what is called improving conversation, that is merely the
foolish method by which the still more foolish (ripetizione) philanthropist feebly tries to disarm the just
rancour of the criminal classes (paradosso)”…
“Don’t let us discuss anything solemnly. I am but too conscious of the fact that we are born in an age
when only the dull are treated seriously (paradosso), and I live in terror of not being misunderstood. Don’t
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degrade me into the position of giving you useful information (paradosso). Education is an admirable thing,
but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be thought
(paradosso)”.
2) dialogo drammatico.
Parte I
a) incipit: Ernest porta un esempio dell’inutilità della critica:: “It seems that a lady once gravely asked the
remorseful Academician, as you call him, if his celebrated picture of “A Spring Day at Whiteley’s”,
“Waiting for the last Omnibus”, or some subject of that kind, was all painted by hand” G. “And was it?”
(metalogismo) E. “You are incorrigible”
b) la vita come Arte: E. “But what are the two supreme and highest arts?” G. “Life and Literature, life and
the perfect expression of life”
c) superiorità della letteratura rispetto alle altre arti: G. “Words have not merely music as sweet as that of
viol and lute, colour as rich and vivid as any that makes lovely for us the canvas of the Venetian or the
Spaniard, and plastic form no less sure and certain than that which reveals itself in marble or in bronze, but
thought and passion and spirituality are theirs also, are theirs indeed alone. If the Greeks had criticized
nothing but language, they would still have been the great art-critics of the world. To know the principles of
the highest art is to know the principles of all the arts”
d) la critica come fondamento analitico di ogni atto creativo: G. “The antithesis between (the creative and
the critical faculty) is entirely arbitrary. Without the critical faculty, there is no artistic creation at all… ”
e) elogio dell’artificio: G. “All fine imaginative work is self-conscious and deliberate”. G.: “Every century,
and the work that seems to us to be the most natural and simple product of its time is always the result of
the most self-conscious effort. Believe me, Ernest, there is no fine art without self-consciousness, and selfconsciousness and the critical spirit are one”… “For there is no art where there is no style, and no style
where there is no unity, and unity is of the individual”
f) elogio dell’individualità/-ismo: G. “The longer one studies life and literature, the more strongly one feels
that behind everything that is wonderful stands the individual, and that it is not the moment that makes the
man, but the man who creates the age”
g) facoltà critica (innovativa) e creativa (ripetitiva): G.: “For it is the critical faculty that invents fresh
forms. The tendency of creation is to repeat itself”. G.: “Anybody can write a three-volumed novel. It
merely requires a complete ignorance of both life and literature. The difficulty that I should fancy the
reviewer feels is the difficulty of sustaining any standard”
h) vita attiva / vita contemplativa: G.:“Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it”… “The
one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it”… “When we have fully discovered the scientific laws that
govern life, we shall realize that the one person who has more illusions than the dreamer is the man of
action. He, indeed, knows neither the origin of his deeds nor their results”… “Each littel thing that we do
passes into the great machine of life which may grind our virtues to powder and make them worthless, or
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transform our sins into elements of a new civilization, more marvellous and more splendid than any that has
gone before”… G.: “When man acts he is a puppet. When he describes it he is a poet” (p. 22) G.: “What is
action? It dies the moment of its energy. It is abase concession to fact. The world is made by the singer for
the dreamer”
i) l’Arte non è soggetta al tempo: G.: “If they know nothing of death, it is because they know little of life,
for the secrets of life and death belong to those, and those only, whom the sequence of time affects, and
who possesses not merely the present but the future, and can rise or fall from a past of glory or of shame”
l) autonomia dlela critica edell’arte: G.: “Criticism is no more to be judged by any low standard of
imitation or resemblance than is the work of a poet or a sculptor. The critic occupies the same relation to the
work of art that he criticizes as the artist does the visible world of form and colour, or the unseen world of
passion and of thought”… “It works with materials, and puts them into a form that is at once new and
delightful. What more can one say of poetry? Indeed, I would call criticism a creation within a creation
within a creation. For just as the great artists, from Homer and Aeschylus, down to Shakespeare and Keats,
did not go directly to life for their subject-matter, but sought for it in myth, and legend, and ancient tale, so
the critic deals with materials that others have, as it were, purified for him, and to which imaginative form
and colour have been already added. Nay, more, I would say that the highest Criticism, being the purest
form of personal impression, is in its way more creative than creation, as it has least reference to any
standard external to itself, and is, in fact, its own reason for existing, and, as the Greeks would put it, in
itself, and to itself, an end. Certainly, it is never trammelled by any shackles of verisimilitude”
m) soggettività della critica: G.: “Criticism’s most perfect form… is in its essence purely subjective, and
seeks to reveal its own secret and not the secret of another. For the highest Criticism deals with art not as
expressive but as impressive purely”… G.: “It treats the work of art simply as the starting-point for a new
creation. It does not confine itself – let us at least suppose so for the moment – to discovering the real
intention of the artist and accepting that as final. And in this it is right, for the meaning of any beautiful
created thing is, at least, as much in the soul of him who looks at it, as it was in his soul who wrought it.
Nay, it is rather the beholder who lends to the beautiful thing its myriad meanings… For when the work is
finished it has, as it were, an independent life of its own, and may deliver a message far other than that
which was put into its lips to say… (p. 29) To the critic the work of art is simply a suggestion for a new
work of his own, that need not necessarily bear any obvious resemblance to the thing it criticizes”
Parte II (after supper)
a) funzione dell’interprete: G.: “…it is only by intensifying his own personality that the critic can interpret
the personality and work of others, and the more strongly this personality enters into the interpretation the
more real the interpretation becomes, the more satisfying, the more convincing, and the more true”…
(personality) “is an element of revelation. If you wish to understand others you must intensifyt your own
individualism”
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b) la vita senza forma: G.: “For life is terribly deficient in form. Its catastrophes happen in the wrong way
and to the wrong people. There is a grotesque horror about its comedies, and its tragedies seem to culminate
in farce. One is always wounded when one approaches it. Things last either too long, or not long enough”…
E.: “Life is then a failure?” G.: “From the artistic point of view, certainly. And the chief thing that makes
life a failure from the artistic point of view is the thing that lends to life its sordid security, the fact that one
can never repeat exactly the same emotion”
c) funzione catartica dell’Arte: G.: “Art does not hurt us. The tears that we shed at a play are a type of the
exquisite sterile emotions that it is the function of Art to awaken…the sorrow with which Art fills us both
purifies and initiates, If I may quote once more from the great art-critic of the Greeks”
d) immoralità dell’Arte: G.: “All art is immoral… For emotion for the sake of emotion is the aim of art, and
emotion for the sake of action is the aim of life, and of that practical organization of life that we call society.
Society, which is the beginning and the basis of morals, exists simply for the concentration of human
energy, and in order to ensure its own continuance and healthy stability it demands, and no doubts rightly
demands, of each of its citizens that he should contribute some form of productive labour to the common
weal, and toil and travail that the day’s work may be done. Society often forgives the criminal; it never
forgives the dreamer. The beautiful sterile emotions that art excites in us are hateful in its eyes, and so
completely are people dominated by the tyranny of this dreadful social ideal that they are always coming
shamelessly up to one at Private Views and other places that are open to the general public, and saying in a
loud stentorian voice, “What are you doing?” whereas “What are you thinking?” is the question that any
single civilized being should ever be allowed to whisper to another” … (p. 44) “Yes: all the arts are
immoral, except those baser forms of sensual or didactic srt that seek to excite to action of evil or of good.
For action of every kind belongs to the sphere of ethics. The aim of art is simply to create a mood”
e) elogio della contemplazione: G.: “It is to do nothing that the elects exist. Action is limited and relative.
Unlimited and absolute is the vision of him who sits at ease and watches, who walks in loneliness and
dreams”
f) il critico perfetto: G.: “It seems to me that with the development of the critical spirit we shall be able to
realize, not merely our own lives, but the collective life of the race, and so to make ourselves absolutely
modern, in the true meaning of the word modernity. For to whom the present is the only thing that is
present, knows nothing of the age in which he lives. To realize the nineteenth century, one must realize
every century that has preceded it and that has contributed to its making. To know anything about oneself
one must know all about others”… (p. 43) “Do you think that it is the imagination that enables us to live
these countless lives? Yes: it is the imagination; and the imagination is the result of heredity” …. (p. 45)
“For the development of the race depends on the development of the individual, and where self-culture has
ceased to be the ideal, the intellectual standard is instantly lowered, and, often, ultimately lost.”
g) la maschera come espressione della verità dell’io: G.: “the objective form is the most subjective in
matter. Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the
truth”… (p. 49) “Nor, again, is the critic really limited to the subjective form of expression. The method of
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drama is his, as well as the method the epos. He may use dialogue, as he did who set Milton talking to
Marvell on the nature of comedy and tragedy, and made Sidney and Lord Brooke discourse on letters
beneath the Penhurst oaks; or adopt narration, as Mr Pater is fond of doing, each of whose Imaginary
Portraits presents to us, under the fanciful guise of fiction, some fine and exquisite piece of criticism…”
h) il critico perfetto: G.: “A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal is absolutely fatal. The true
critic will, indeed, always be sincere in his devotion to the principle of beauty, but he will seek for beauty in
every age and in each school, and will never suffer himself to be limited to any settled custom of thought, or
stereotyped mode of looking at things. He will realize himself in many forms, and by a thousand different
ways, and will ever be curious of new sensations and fresh points of view. Through constant change, and
through constant change alone, he will find his true unity. He will not consent to be the slave of his own
opinions. For what is mind but motion in the intellectual sphere? The essence of thought, as the essence of
life, is growth… What people call insincerity is simply a method by which we can multiply our
personalities… Of the two qualifications you mentioned, two, sincerity and fairness, were, if not actually
moral, at least on the borderland of morals, and the first condition of criticism is that the critic should be
able to recognize that the sphere of Art and the sphere of Ethics are absolutely distinct and separate. When
they are confused, Chaos has come again”. G.: “The influence of the critic will be the mere fact of his own
existence. He will represent the flawless type. In him the culture of the century will see itself realized. You
must not ask him to have any aim other than the perfecting of himself. The demand of the intellect, as has
been well said, is simply to feel itself alive”
i) elogio del principio formale: G.: “The real artist is he who proceeds, not from feeling to form, but from
form to thought and passion”… “In the very sphere of life Form is the beginning of things. The rhythmic
harmonious gesture of dancing convey, Plato tells us, both rhythm and harmony into the mind”
l) l’artista, a differenza del critico, non è capace di giudicare le opere di altri artisti
m) commento finale di Ernest: “You have told me that it is more difficult to talk about a thing that to do it,
and that to do nothing at all is the most difficult thing in the world; you have told me that all Art is immoral,
and all thought dangerous; that criticism is more creative than creation, and that the highest criticism is that
which reveals in the work of Art what the artist had not put there; that it is exactly because a man cannot do
a thing that he is the proper judge of it; and that the true critic is unfair, insincere, and not rational. My
friend, you are a dreamer”
n) explicit: (p. 65) G.: “It is too late to go to sleep. Let us go down to Covent Garden and look at the roses.
Come! I am tired of thought”
***
2) The Soul of Man Under Socialism (1891):
a) proprietà privata: “the recognition of private property has really harmed Individualism, and obscured it,
by confusing a man with what he possesses… The true perfection of man lies, not in what man has, but in
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what man is. Private property has crushed true Individualism, and set up an Individualism that is false…
The industry necessary for the making of money is also very demoralizing… Man will kill himself by
overwork in order to secure property, and really, considering the enormous advantages that property brings,
one is hardly surprised… Now, nothing should be able to harm a man except himself. Nothing should be
able to rob a man at all. What a man really has, is what is in him. What is outside him should be a matter of
no importance”… “What Jesus does say, is that man reaches his perfection, not through what he has, not
even through what he does, but entirely through what he is”
b) carità e sentimentalismo vittoriani: “The majority of people spoil their lives by an unhealthy and
exaggerated altruism”… “But their remedies do not cure the disease: they merely prolong it”… “it is an
aggravation of the difficulty. But the proper aim is to ty and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty
will be impossible. And the altruistic virtues have really prevented the carrying out of this aim. Just as the
worst slave-owners were those who were kind to their slaves, and so prevented the horror of the system
being realized by those who suffered from it, and understood by those who contemplated it, so, in the
present state of things in England, the people who do most harm are the people who try to do most good;
and at last we have had the spectacle of men who have really studied the problem and know the life –
educated men who live in the East-End – coming forward and imploring the community to restrain its
altruistic impulses of charity, benevolence, and the like. They do so on the ground that such charity
degrades and demoralizes. They are perfectly right. Charity creates a multitude of sins… It is immoral to
use private property in order to alleviate the horrible evils that result from the institution of private property.
It is both immoral and unfair”
c) autorità: “If the Socialism is Authoritarian; if there are Governments armed with the economic power as
they are now with political power; if, in a word, we are to have Industrial Tyrannies, then the last state of
man will be worse than the first”… “It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through
disobedience and through rebellion”… “Agitators are a set of interfering, meddling people, who come down
to some perfectly contented class of the community, and sow the seeds of discontent amongst them. That is
the reason why agitators are so absolutely necessary. Without them, in our incomplete state, there would be
no advance towards civilization” … “But I confess that many of the socialistic views that I have come
across seem to me to be tainted with ideas of authority, if not actual compulsion. Of course, authority and
compulsion are out of the question. All association must be quite voluntary. It is only in voluntary
associations that man is fine” … “Whenever there is a man who exercises authority, there is a man who
resists authority”
d) criminalità: “When private property is abolished there will be no necessary for crime, no demand for it;
it will cease to exist”
e) macchina: “Up to the present, man has been, to a certain extent, the slave of machinery, and there is
something tragic in the fact that as soon as man had invented a machine to do his work he began to starve”
f) giornalismo: “We are dominated by Journalism. In America the President reigns for four years, and
Journalism governs for ever and ever. Fortunately, in America, Journalism has carried its authority to the
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grossest and most brutal extreme. As a natural consequence it has begun to create a spirit of revolt”… (p.
277) “The fact is that the public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth
knowing. Journalism, conscious of this, and having tradesmanlike habits, supplies their demands”… “The
harm is done by the serious, thoughtful, earnest journalist, who solemnly, as they are doing at present, will
drag before the eyes of the public some incident in the private life of a great statesman, of a man who is the
leader of political thought as he is a creator of political force, and invite the public to discuss the incident, to
exercise authority in the matter, to give their views: and not merely to give their views, but to carry them
into action, to dictate to his country; in fact to make themselves ridiculous, offensive, and harmful. The
private lives of men and women should not be told to the public. The public have nothing to do with them
all.”
h) opinione pubblica: “the question of popular control in the matter of Art, by which I mean Public Opinion
dictating to the artist the form which he is to use, the mode in which he is to use it, and the materials with
which he is to work”
Wilde propone invece:
a) socialismo come liberazione dai vincoli familiari: “Socialism annihilates family life”… “With the
abolition of private property, marriage in its present form must disappear… Individualism accepts this and
makes it fine. It converts the abolition of legal restraint into a form of freedom that will help the full
development of personality, and make the love of man and woman more wonderful, more beautiful, and
more ennobling. Jesus knew this. He rejected the claims of family life, although they existed in his day and
community in a very marked form. ‘Who is my mother? Who are my brothers?’ he said, when he was told
that they wished to speak to him. When one of his followers asked leave to go and bury his father, ‘Let the
dead bury the dead’, was his terrible answer. He would allow no claim whatsoever to be made on
personality”
b) l’uomo perfetto nel sistema socialista: “What I mean by a perfect man is one who develops under perfect
conditions; one who is not wounded, or worried, or maimed, or in danger”… “The note of the perfect man
is not rebellion but peace”
c) lo Stato: “…the State must give up all idea of government”; “The State is to make what is useful. The
individual is to make what is beautiful”
d) la società ideale come Utopia: “On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the
world depends… There will be great storages of force for every city, and for every house if required, and
this force man will convert into heat, light, or motion, according to his needs. Is this Utopian? A map of the
world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which
Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets
sail. Progress is the realization of Utopias.”
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e) forma massima di Individualismo = Arte: “Art is the most intense mode of Individualism that the world
has known. I am inclined to say that it is the only real mode of Individualism that the world has known”…
“Art should never try to be popular”… “We have been able to have fine poetry in England because the
public do not read it, and consequently do not influence it”… “In the case of the novel and the drama, arts
in which the public do take an interest, the result of the exercise of popular authority has been absolutely
ridiculous”… “The popular standard is of such a character that no artist can get to it. It is at once too easy
and too difficult to be a popular novelist. It is too easy, because the requirements of the public as far as plot,
style, psychology, treatment of life, and treatment of literature are concerned are within the reach of the
very meanest capacity and the most uncultivated mind. It is too difficult, because to meet such requirements
the artist would have to do violence to his temperament, would have to write not for the artistic joy of
writing, but for the amusement of the half-educated people, and so would have to suppress his
individualism, forget his culture, annihilate his style, and surrender everything that is valuable to him. In the
case of the drama, things are a little better: the theatre-going public like the obvious, it is true, but they do
not like the tedious; and burlesque and farcical conditions, and in work of this kind the artist in England is
allowed very great freedom. It is when one comes to the higher forms of the drama that the result of popular
control is seen. The one thing that the public dislike is novelty…” (p. 273) “Art is Individualism, and
Individualism is a disturbing force”… “In Art, the public accept what has been, because they cannot alter it,
not because they appreciate it”… “The fact is, the public make use of the classics of a country as a means of
checking the progress of Art. They degrade the classics into authorities”
f) pubblico perfetto: “The work of art is to dominate the spectator: the spectator is not to dominate the work
of art. The spectator is to be receptive. He is to be the violin on which the master is to play”… “A
temperament capable of receiving, through an imaginative medium, and under imaginative conditions, new
and beautiful impressions, is the only temperament that can appreciate a work of art”
g) egoismo (individualismo socialista) / egotismo (regime di competizione): “Selfishenss is not living as
one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live. And unselfishness is letting other
people’s lives alone, not interfering with them. Unselfishness recognizes infinite variety of type as a
delightful thing, accepts it, acquiesces in it, enjoys it. It is not selfish to think for oneself. A man who does
not think for himself does not think at all… A red rose is not selfish because it wants to be a red rose. It
would be horribly selfish if it wanted all the other flowers in the garden to be both red and roses…. The
egoist is he who claims upon others, and the Individualist will not desire to do that”
h) elogio dell’affettazione: “What is true about Art is true about Life. A man is called affected, nowadays, if
he dresses as he likes to dress. But in doing that he is acting in a perfectly natural manner. Affectation, in
such matters, consists in dressing according to the views of one’s neighbour, whose views, as they are the
views of the majority, will probably be extremely stupid.”
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THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY (1890)
1) DANDY
And, certainly, to him Life itself was the first, the greatest, of the arts, and for it all the other arts seemed to
be but a preparation. Fashion, by which what is really fantastic becomes for a moment universal, and
Dandyism, which, in its own way, is an attempt to assert the absolute modernity of beauty, had, of course,
their fascination for him. His mode of dressing, and the particular styles that from time to time he affected,
had their marked influence on the young exquisites of the Mayfair balls and Pall Mall club windows, who
copied him in everything that he did, and tried to reproduce the accidental charm of his graceful, though to
him only half-serious, fopperies.
For while he was but too ready to accept the position that was almost immediately offered to him on
his coming of age, and found, indeed, a subtle pleasure in the thought that he might really become to the
London of his own day what the imperial Neronian Rome the author of the ‘Satyricon’ once had been, yet
in his inmost heart he desired to be something more than a mere arbiter elegantiarum, to be consulted on
the wearing of a jewel, or the knotting of a necktie, or the conduct of a cane. He sought to elaborate some
new scheme of life that would have its reasoned philosophy and its ordered principles, and find in the
spiritualizing of the senses its highest realization (XI: 144-145)
2) The Preface
The artist is the creator of beautiful things.
To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim.
The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things.
The highest, as the lowest, for of criticism is a mode of autobiography.
Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.
Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For there there is hope.
They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty.
There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book.
Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.
The nineteenth-century dislike of Realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in the glass.
The moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the
perfect use of an imperfect medium. No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are true can be
proved.
No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style.
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No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything.
Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art.
Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art.
From the point of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art of the musician. From the point of view of
feeling, the actor’s craft is the type.
All art is at once surface and symbol.
Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.
Those who read the symbol do so at their peril.
It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.
When critics disagree the artist is in accord with himself. We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as
long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admores it intensely.
All art is quite useless.
3) INCIPIT:
The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the
trees of the garden, there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate
perfume of the pink-flowering thorn.
[…]
In the centre of the room, clamped to an upright easel, stood the full-length portrait of a young man of
extraordinary personal beauty, and in front of it, some little distance away, was sitting the artist himself,
Basil Hallward, whose sudden disappearance some years ago caused, at the time, such public excitement and
gave rise to so many strange conjectures.
Cfr. Walter Pater, da The Child in the House, 1878
The perfume of the little flowers of the lime-tree fell through the air upon them like rain; while time seemed
to move ever more slowly to the murmur of the bees in it, till it almost stood still on June afternoons. How
insignificant, at the moment, seem the influences of the sensible things which are tossed and fall and lie
about us, so, or so, in the environment of early childhood. How indelibly, as we afterwards discover, they
affect us; with what capricious attractions and associations they figure themselves on the white paper, the
smooth wax, of our ingenuous souls, as "with lead in the rock for ever," giving form and feature, and as it
were assigned house-room in our memory, to early experiences of feeling and thought, which abide with us
ever afterwards, thus, and not otherwise. The realities and passions, the rumours of the greater world without,
steal in upon us, each by its own special little passage-way, through the wall of custom about us; and never
afterwards quite detach themselves from this or that accident, or trick, in the mode of their first entrance to u
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Cfr. Oscar Wilde, da De Profundis (1897)
I tremble with pleasure when I think that on the very day of my leaving prison both the laburnum and the
lilac will be blooming in the gardens, and that I shall see the wind stir into restless beauty the swaying gold
of the one, and make the other toss the pale purple of its plumes, so that all the air shall be Arabia for me.
Linnaeus fell on his knees and wept for joy when he saw for the first time the long heath of some English
upland made yellow with the tawny aromatic brooms of the common furze; and I know that for me, to whom
flowers are part of desire, there are tears waiting in the petals of some rose. It has always been so with me
from my boyhood. There is not a single colour hidden away in the chalice of a flower, or the curve of a
shell, to which, by some subtle sympathy with the very soul of things, my nature does not answer. Like
Gautier, I have always been one of those ‘pour qui le monde visible existe.’
Still, I am conscious now that behind all this beauty, satisfying though it may be, there is some spirit
hidden of which the painted forms and shapes are but modes of manifestation, and it is with this spirit that I
desire to become in harmony. I have grown tired of the articulate utterances of men and things. The
Mystical in Art, the Mystical in Life, the Mystical in Nature this is what I am looking for. It is absolutely
necessary for me to find it somewhere.
4) BASIL NON VUOLE ESPORRE IL QUADRO:
"Well, I will tell you what it is. I want you to explain to me why you won't exhibit Dorian Gray's
picture. I want the real reason."
"I told you the real reason."
"No, you did not. You said it was because there was too much of yourself in it. Now, that is childish."
"Harry," said Basil Hallward, looking him straight in the face, "every portrait that is painted with
feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he
who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the coloured canvas, reveals himself. The
reason I will not exhibit this picture is that I am afraid that I have shown in it the secret of my own soul." (I)
[…]
"He is all my art to me now," said the painter gravely. "I sometimes think, Harry, that there are only
two eras of any importance in the world's history. The first is the appearance of a new medium for art, and
the second is the appearance of a new personality for art also. What the invention of oil-painting was to the
Venetians, the face of Antinous was to late Greek sculpture, and the face of Dorian Gray will some day be to
me. It is not merely that I paint from him, draw from him, sketch from him. Of course, I have done all that.
But he is much more to me than a model or a sitter. I won't tell you that I am dissatisfied with what I have
done of him, or that his beauty is such that art cannot express it. There is nothing that art cannot express, and
I know that the work I have done, since I met Dorian Gray, is good work, is the best work of my life. But in
some curious way--I wonder will you understand me?--his personality has suggested to me an entirely new
manner in art, an entirely new mode of style. I see things differently, I think of them differently. I can now
recreate life in a way that was hidden from me before. 'A dream of form in days of thought'--who is it who
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says that? I forget; but it is what Dorian Gray has been to me. The merely visible presence of this lad--for he
seems to me little more than a lad, though he is really over twenty--his merely visible presence--ah! I wonder
can you realize all that that means? Unconsciously he defines for me the lines of a fresh school, a school that
is to have in it all the passion of the romantic spirit, all the perfection of the spirit that is Greek. The harmony
of soul and body--how much that is! We in our madness have separated the two, and have invented a realism
that is vulgar, an ideality that is void. Harry! if you only knew what Dorian Gray is to me! You remember
that landscape of mine, for which Agnew offered me such a huge price but which I would not part with? It is
one of the best things I have ever done. And why is it so? Because, while I was painting it, Dorian Gray sat
beside me. Some subtle influence passed from him to me, and for the first time in my life I saw in the plain
woodland the wonder I had always looked for and always missed."
"Basil, this is extraordinary! I must see Dorian Gray."
Hallward got up from the seat and walked up and down the garden. After some time he came back.
"Harry," he said, "Dorian Gray is to me simply a motive in art. You might see nothing in him. I see
everything in him. He is never more present in my work than when no image of him is there. He is a
suggestion, as I have said, of a new manner. I find him in the curves of certain lines, in the loveliness and
subtleties of certain colours. That is all."
"Then why won't you exhibit his portrait?" asked Lord Henry.
"Because, without intending it, I have put into it some expression of all this curious artistic idolatry, of
which, of course, I have never cared to speak to him. He knows nothing about it. He shall never know
anything about it. But the world might guess it, and I will not bare my soul to their shallow prying eyes. My
heart shall never be put under their microscope. There is too much of myself in the thing, Harry--too much of
myself!"
"Poets are not so scrupulous as you are. They know how useful passion is for publication. Nowadays a
broken heart will run to many editions."
"I hate them for it," cried Hallward. "An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of
his own life into them. We live in an age when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of
autobiography. We have lost the abstract sense of beauty. Some day I will show the world what it is; and for
that reason the world shall never see my portrait of Dorian Gray." (I)
5) IMMORALITÀ DELL’INFLUENZA SULL’ALTRO:
“There is no such thing as a good influence, Mr. Gray. All influence is immoral--immoral from the
scientific point of view."
"Why?"
"Because to influence a person is to give him one's own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or
burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are
borrowed. He becomes an echo of some one else's music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him.
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The aim of life is self-development. To realize one's nature perfectly--that is what each of us is here for.
People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one
owes to one's self. Of course, they are charitable. They feed the hungry and clothe the beggar. But their own
souls starve, and are naked. Courage has gone out of our race. Perhaps we never really had it. The terror of
society, which is the basis of morals, the terror of God, which is the secret of religion--these are the two
things that govern us. And yet--" (II)
6) TENTAZIONI E PULSIONALITÀ: CONTRO IL CODICE ETICO. L’UOMO DOPPIO
But the bravest man amongst us is afraid of himself. The mutilation of the savage has its tragic survival
in the self-denial that mars our lives. We are punished for our refusals. Every impulse that we strive to
strangle broods in the mind and poisons us. The body sins once, and has done with its sin, for action is a
mode of purification. Nothing remains then but the recollection of a pleasure, or the luxury of a regret. The
only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the
things it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful.
It has been said that the great events of the world take place in the brain. It is in the brain, and the brain only,
that the great sins of the world take place also. You, Mr. Gray, you yourself, with your rose-red youth and
your rose-white boyhood, you have had passions that have made you afraid, thoughts that have filled you
with terror, day-dreams and sleeping dreams whose mere memory might stain your cheek with shame--"
"Stop!" faltered Dorian Gray, "stop! you bewilder me. I don't know what to say. There is some answer
to you, but I cannot find it. Don't speak. Let me think. Or, rather, let me try not to think." (II)
7) BEAUTY AND YOUTH
To me, beauty is the wonder of wonders. It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances.
The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.... Yes, Mr. Gray, the gods have been good to
you. But what the gods give they quickly take away. You have only a few years in which to live really,
perfectly, and fully. When your youth goes, your beauty will go with it, and then you will suddenly discover
that there are no triumphs left for you, or have to content yourself with those mean triumphs that the memory
of your past will make more bitter than defeats. Every month as it wanes brings you nearer to something
dreadful. Time is jealous of you, and wars against your lilies and your roses. You will become sallow, and
hollow-cheeked, and dull-eyed. You will suffer horribly.... Ah! realize your youth while you have it. Don't
squander the gold of your days, listening to the tedious, trying to improve the hopeless failure, or giving
away your life to the ignorant, the common, and the vulgar. These are the sickly aims, the false ideals, of our
age. Live! Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for new
sensations. Be afraid of nothing.... A new Hedonism--that is what our century wants. You might be its visible
symbol. With your personality there is nothing you could not do. The world belongs to you for a season....
The moment I met you I saw that you were quite unconscious of what you really are, of what you really
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might be. There was so much in you that charmed me that I felt I must tell you something about yourself. I
thought how tragic it would be if you were wasted. For there is such a little time that your youth will last-such a little time. The common hill-flowers wither, but they blossom again. The laburnum will be as yellow
next June as it is now. In a month there will be purple stars on the clematis, and year after year the green
night of its leaves will hold its purple stars. But we never get back our youth. The pulse of joy that beats in us
at twenty becomes sluggish. Our limbs fail, our senses rot. We degenerate into hideous puppets, haunted by
the memory of the passions of which we were too much afraid, and the exquisite temptations that we had not
the courage to yield to. Youth! Youth! There is absolutely nothing in the world but youth!" (II)
8) IL DESIDERIO DELLA GIOVINEZZA ETERNA: IL QUADRO
Yes, there would be a day when his face would be wrinkled and wizen, his eyes dim and colourless, the
grace of his figure broken and deformed. The scarlet would pass away from his lips and the gold steal from
his hair. The life that was to make his soul would mar his body. He would become dreadful, hideous, and
uncouth.
As he thought of it, a sharp pang of pain struck through him like a knife and made each delicate fibre of
his nature quiver. His eyes deepened into amethyst, and across them came a mist of tears. He felt as if a hand
of ice had been laid upon his heart.
"Don't you like it?" cried Hallward at last, stung a little by the lad's silence, not understanding what it
meant.
"Of course he likes it," said Lord Henry. "Who wouldn't like it? It is one of the greatest things in
modern art. I will give you anything you like to ask for it. I must have it."
"It is not my property, Harry."
"Whose property is it?"
"Dorian's, of course," answered the painter.
"He is a very lucky fellow."
"How sad it is!" murmured Dorian Gray with his eyes still fixed upon his own portrait. "How sad it is! I
shall grow old, and horrible, and dreadful. But this picture will remain always young. It will never be older
than this particular day of June.... If it were only the other way! If it were I who was to be always young, and
the picture that was to grow old! For that--for that--I would give everything! Yes, there is nothing in the
whole world I would not give! I would give my soul for that!"
"You would hardly care for such an arrangement, Basil," cried Lord Henry, laughing. "It would be
rather hard lines on your work."
"I should object very strongly, Harry," said Hallward.
Dorian Gray turned and looked at him. "I believe you would, Basil. You like your art better than your
friends. I am no more to you than a green bronze figure. Hardly as much, I dare say."
The painter stared in amazement. It was so unlike Dorian to speak like that. What had happened? He
seemed quite angry. His face was flushed and his cheeks burning.
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"Yes," he continued, "I am less to you than your ivory Hermes or your silver Faun. You will like them
always. How long will you like me? Till I have my first wrinkle, I suppose. I know, now, that when one loses
one's good looks, whatever they may be, one loses everything. Your picture has taught me that. Lord Henry
Wotton is perfectly right. Youth is the only thing worth having. When I find that I am growing old, I shall kill
myself."
Hallward turned pale and caught his hand. "Dorian! Dorian!" he cried, "don't talk like that. I have never
had such a friend as you, and I shall never have such another. You are not jealous of material things, are
you?--you who are finer than any of them!"
"I am jealous of everything whose beauty does not die. I am jealous of the portrait you have painted of
me. Why should it keep what I must lose? Every moment that passes takes something from me and gives
something to it. Oh, if it were only the other way! If the picture could change, and I could be always what I
am now! Why did you paint it? It will mock me some day--mock me horribly!" The hot tears welled into his
eyes; he tore his hand away and, flinging himself on the divan, he buried his face in the cushions, as though
he was praying.
"This is your doing, Harry," said the painter bitterly.
Lord Henry shrugged his shoulders. "It is the real Dorian Gray--that is all."
"It is not."
"If it is not, what have I to do with it?"
"You should have gone away when I asked you," he muttered.
"I stayed when you asked me," was Lord Henry's answer.
"Harry, I can't quarrel with my two best friends at once, but between you both you have made me hate
the finest piece of work I have ever done, and I will destroy it. What is it but canvas and colour? I will not let
it come across our three lives and mar them."
Dorian Gray lifted his golden head from the pillow, and with pallid face and tear-stained eyes, looked
at him as he walked over to the deal painting-table that was set beneath the high curtained window. What
was he doing there? His fingers were straying about among the litter of tin tubes and dry brushes, seeking for
something. Yes, it was for the long palette-knife, with its thin blade of lithe steel. He had found it at last. He
was going to rip up the canvas.
With a stifled sob the lad leaped from the couch, and, rushing over to Hallward, tore the knife out of his
hand, and flung it to the end of the studio. "Don't, Basil, don't!" he cried. "It would be murder!"
"I am glad you appreciate my work at last, Dorian," said the painter coldly when he had recovered from
his surprise. "I never thought you would."
"Appreciate it? I am in love with it, Basil. It is part of myself. I feel that." (II: 33-35)
9) IL DOPPIO
"Yes," answered Lord Henry dreamily, "the costume of the nineteenth century is detestable. It is so
sombre, so depressing. Sin is the only real colour-element left in modern life."
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"You really must not say things like that before Dorian, Harry."
"Before which Dorian? The one who is pouring out tea for us, or the one in the picture?"
"Before either."
"I should like to come to the theatre with you, Lord Henry," said the lad.
"Then you shall come; and you will come, too, Basil, won't you?"
"I can't, really. I would sooner not. I have a lot of work to do."
"Well, then, you and I will go alone, Mr. Gray."
"I should like that awfully."
The painter bit his lip and walked over, cup in hand, to the picture. "I shall stay with the real Dorian,"
he said, sadly.
"Is it the real Dorian?" cried the original of the portrait, strolling across to him. "Am I really like
that?"
"Yes; you are just like that."
"How wonderful, Basil!"
"At least you are like it in appearance. But it will never alter," sighed Hallward. "That is something." (II)
10) DORIAN come CREAZIONE DI HENRY WOTTON
To a large extent the lad was his own creation. He had made him premature. That was something.
Ordinary people waited till life disclosed to them its secrets, but to the few, to the elect, the mysteries of life
were revealed before the veil was drawn away. Sometimes this was the effect of art, and chiefly of the art of
literature, which dealt immediately with the passions and the intellect. But now and then a complex
personality took the place and assumed the office of art, was indeed, in its way, a real work of art, life having
its elaborate masterpieces, just as poetry has, or sculpture, or painting. (IV)
11) SEPARAZIONE E COMMISTIONE FRA CORPO E ANIMA
Soul and body, body and soul--how mysterious they were! There was animalism in the soul, and the
body had its moments of spirituality. The senses could refine, and the intellect could degrade. Who could say
where the fleshly impulse ceased, or the psychical impulse began? How shallow were the arbitrary
definitions of ordinary psychologists! And yet how difficult to decide between the claims of the various
schools! Was the soul a shadow seated in the house of sin? Or was the body really in the soul, as Giordano
Bruno thought? The separation of spirit from matter was a mystery, and the union of spirit with matter was a
mystery also. (IV)
12) LO STUDIO DELLE PASSIONI E IL METODO SPERIMENTALE
It was clear to him that the experimental method was the only method by which one could arrive at any
scientific analysis of the passions; and certainly Dorian Gray was a subject made to his hand, and seemed to
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promise rich and fruitful results. His sudden mad love for Sibyl Vane was a psychological phenomenon of
no small interest. There was no doubt that curiosity had much to do with it, curiosity and the desire for new
experiences, yet it was not a simple, but rather a very complex passion. What there was in it of the purely
sensuous instinct of boyhood had been transformed by the workings of the imagination, changed into
something that seemed to the lad himself to be remote from sense, and was for that very reason all the more
dangerous. It was the passions about whose origin we deceived ourselves that tyrannized most strongly over
us. Our weakest motives were those of whose nature we were conscious. It often happened that when we
thought we were experimenting on others we were really experimenting on ourselves. (IV)
13) HENRY WOTTON COME DOPPIO NEGATIVO DI DORIAN
“[…] Yes, Dorian, you will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you have never had the
courage to commit." (VI)
14) LA PRIMA METAMORFOSI DEL QUADRO
Finally, he came back, went over to the picture, and examined it. In the dim arrested light that struggled
through the cream-coloured silk blinds, the face appeared to him to be a little changed. The expression
looked different. One would have said that there was a touch of cruelty in the mouth. It was certainly strange.
[…]
He rubbed his eyes, and came close to the picture, and examined it again. There were no signs of any
change when he looked into the actual painting, and yet there was no doubt that the whole expression had
altered. It was not a mere fancy of his own. The thing was horribly apparent.
He threw himself into a chair and began to think. Suddenly there flashed across his mind what he had
said in Basil Hallward's studio the day the picture had been finished. Yes, he remembered it perfectly. He
had uttered a mad wish that he himself might remain young, and the portrait grow old; that his own beauty
might be untarnished, and the face on the canvas bear the burden of his passions and his sins; that the painted
image might be seared with the lines of suffering and thought, and that he might keep all the delicate bloom
and loveliness of his then just conscious boyhood. Surely his wish had not been fulfilled? Such things were
impossible. It seemed monstrous even to think of them. And, yet, there was the picture before him, with the
touch of cruelty in the mouth.
Cruelty! Had he been cruel? It was the girl's fault, not his. […]
The picture, changed or unchanged, would be to him the visible emblem of conscience. He would resist
temptation. He would not see Lord Henry any more--would not, at any rate, listen to those subtle poisonous
theories that in Basil Hallward's garden had first stirred within him the passion for impossible things. He
would go back to Sibyl Vane, make her amends, marry her, try to love her again. Yes, it was his duty to do
so. She must have suffered more than he had. Poor child! He had been selfish and cruel to her. The
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fascination that she had exercised over him would return. They would be happy together. His life with her
would be beautiful and pure.
He got up from his chair and drew a large screen right in front of the portrait, shuddering as he glanced
at it. "How horrible!" he murmured to himself, and he walked across to the window and opened it. When he
stepped out on to the grass, he drew a deep breath. The fresh morning air seemed to drive away all his
sombre passions. (VII)
15) L’INTERSSE SCIENTIFICO DI DORIAN NEL VEDERE IL SEGNO DEL PROPRIO DEGRADO:
GUIDA ETICA
He got up and locked both doors. At least he would be alone when he looked upon the mask of his
shame. Then he drew the screen aside and saw himself face to face. It was perfectly true. The portrait had
altered.
As he often remembered afterwards, and always with no small wonder, he found himself at first gazing
at the portrait with a feeling of almost scientific interest. That such a change should have taken place was
incredible to him. And yet it was a fact. Was there some subtle affinity between the chemical atoms that
shaped themselves into form and colour on the canvas and the soul that was within him? Could it be that
what that soul thought, they realized?--that what it dreamed, they made true? Or was there some other, more
terrible reason? He shuddered, and felt afraid, and, going back to the couch, lay there, gazing at the picture in
sickened horror.
One thing, however, he felt that it had done for him. It had made him conscious how unjust, how cruel,
he had been to Sibyl Vane. It was not too late to make reparation for that. She could still be his wife. His
unreal and selfish love would yield to some higher influence, would be transformed into some nobler
passion, and the portrait that Basil Hallward had painted of him would be a guide to him through life, would
be to him what holiness is to some, and conscience to others, and the fear of God to us all. There were
opiates for remorse, drugs that could lull the moral sense to sleep. But here was a visible symbol of the
degradation of sin. Here was an ever-present sign of the ruin men brought upon their souls. (VIII)
16) LA COSCIENZA COME FORMA DI EGOTISMO
“[…] Conscience makes egotists of us all. Yes; there is really no end to the consolations that women find in
modern life. Indeed, I have not mentioned the most important one." (VIII)
17) NARCISO E LO SPECCHIO: VERSO UN SAPERE SCIENTIFICO
Eternal youth, infinite passion, pleasures subtle and secret, wild joys and wilder sins--he was to have all
these things. The portrait was to bear the burden of his shame: that was all.
A feeling of pain crept over him as he thought of the desecration that was in store for the fair face on
the canvas. Once, in boyish mockery of Narcissus, he had kissed, or feigned to kiss, those painted lips that
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now smiled so cruelly at him. Morning after morning he had sat before the portrait wondering at its beauty,
almost enamoured of it, as it seemed to him at times. Was it to alter now with every mood to which he
yielded? Was it to become a monstrous and loathsome thing, to be hidden away in a locked room, to be shut
out from the sunlight that had so often touched to brighter gold the waving wonder of its hair? The pity of it!
the pity of it!
For a moment, he thought of praying that the horrible sympathy that existed between him and the
picture might cease. It had changed in answer to a prayer; perhaps in answer to a prayer it might remain
unchanged. And yet, who, that knew anything about life, would surrender the chance of remaining always
young, however fantastic that chance might be, or with what fateful consequences it might be fraught?
Besides, was it really under his control? Had it indeed been prayer that had produced the substitution? Might
there not be some curious scientific reason for it all? If thought could exercise its influence upon a living
organism, might not thought exercise an influence upon dead and inorganic things? Nay, without thought or
conscious desire, might not things external to ourselves vibrate in unison with our moods and passions, atom
calling to atom in secret love or strange affinity? But the reason was of no importance. He would never
again tempt by a prayer any terrible power. If the picture was to alter, it was to alter. That was all. Why
inquire too closely into it?
For there would be a real pleasure in watching it. He would be able to follow his mind into its secret
places. This portrait would be to him the most magical of mirrors. As it had revealed to him his own body, so
it would reveal to him his own soul. And when winter came upon it, he would still be standing where spring
trembles on the verge of summer. When the blood crept from its face, and left behind a pallid mask of chalk
with leaden eyes, he would keep the glamour of boyhood. Not one blossom of his loveliness would ever
fade. Not one pulse of his life would ever weaken. Like the gods of the Greeks, he would be strong, and
fleet, and joyous. What did it matter what happened to the coloured image on the canvas? He would be safe.
That was everything. (VIII)
18) SPETTATORE DELLA PROPRIA VITA
“To become the spectator of one's own life, as Harry says, is to escape the suffering of life. I know you are
surprised at my talking to you like this. […] Don't leave me, Basil, and don't quarrel with me. I am what I
am. There is nothing more to be said." (IX)
19) LA CONFESSIONE DI BASIL: ARTE-VITA
Dorian, from the moment I met you, your personality had the most extraordinary influence over me. I was
dominated, soul, brain, and power, by you. You became to me the visible incarnation of that unseen ideal
whose memory haunts us artists like an exquisite dream. I worshipped you. I grew jealous of every one to
whom you spoke. I wanted to have you all to myself. I was only happy when I was with you. When you were
away from me, you were still present in my art.... Of course, I never let you know anything about this. It
would have been impossible. You would not have understood it. I hardly understood it myself. I only knew
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that I had seen perfection face to face, and that the world had become wonderful to my eyes--too wonderful,
perhaps, for in such mad worships there is peril, the peril of losing them, no less than the peril of keeping
them.... Weeks and weeks went on, and I grew more and more absorbed in you. Then came a new
development. I had drawn you as Paris in dainty armour, and as Adonis with huntsman's cloak and polished
boar-spear. Crowned with heavy lotus-blossoms you had sat on the prow of Adrian's barge, gazing across the
green turbid Nile. You had leaned over the still pool of some Greek woodland and seen in the water's silent
silver the marvel of your own face. And it had all been what art should be--unconscious, ideal, and remote.
One day, a fatal day I sometimes think, I determined to paint a wonderful portrait of you as you actually are,
not in the costume of dead ages, but in your own dress and in your own time. Whether it was the realism of
the method, or the mere wonder of your own personality, thus directly presented to me without mist or veil, I
cannot tell. But I know that as I worked at it, every flake and film of colour seemed to me to reveal my secret.
I grew afraid that others would know of my idolatry. I felt, Dorian, that I had told too much, that I had put
too much of myself into it. Then it was that I resolved never to allow the picture to be exhibited. You were a
little annoyed; but then you did not realize all that it meant to me. Harry, to whom I talked about it, laughed
at me. But I did not mind that. When the picture was finished, and I sat alone with it, I felt that I was right....
Well, after a few days the thing left my studio, and as soon as I had got rid of the intolerable fascination of
its presence, it seemed to me that I had been foolish in imagining that I had seen anything in it, more than
that you were extremely good-looking and that I could paint. Even now I cannot help feeling that it is a
mistake to think that the passion one feels in creation is ever really shown in the work one creates. Art is
always more abstract than we fancy. Form and colour tell us of form and colour--that is all. It often seems to
me that art conceals the artist far more completely than it ever reveals him. And so when I got this offer
from Paris, I determined to make your portrait the principal thing in my exhibition. It never occurred to me
that you would refuse. I see now that you were right. The picture cannot be shown. You must not be angry
with me, Dorian, for what I have told you. As I said to Harry, once, you are made to be worshipped." (IX)
20) IL LIBRO ‘VELENOSO’
His eye fell on the yellow book that Lord Henry had sent him. What was it, he wondered. He went
towards the little, pearl-coloured octagonal stand that had always looked to him like the work of some
strange Egyptian bees that wrought in silver, and taking up the volume, flung himself into an arm-chair and
began to turn over the leaves. After a few minutes he became absorbed. It was the strangest book that he had
ever read. It seemed to him that in exquisite raiment, and to the delicate sound of flutes, the sins of the world
were passing in dumb show before him. Things that he had dimly dreamed of were suddenly made real to
him. Things of which he had never dreamed were gradually revealed.
It was a novel without a plot and with only one character, being, indeed, simply a psychological study
of a certain young Parisian who spent his life trying to realize in the nineteenth century all the passions and
modes of thought that belonged to every century except his own, and to sum up, as it were, in himself the
various moods through which the world-spirit had ever passed, loving for their mere artificiality those
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renunciations that men have unwisely called virtue, as much as those natural rebellions that wise men still
call sin. The style in which it was written was that curious jewelled style, vivid and obscure at once, full of
argot and of archaisms, of technical expressions and of elaborate paraphrases, that characterizes the work of
some of the finest artists of the French school of Symbolistes. There were in it metaphors as monstrous as
orchids and as subtle in colour. The life of the senses was described in the terms of mystical philosophy. One
hardly knew at times whether one was reading the spiritual ecstasies of some mediaeval saint or the morbid
confessions of a modern sinner. It was a poisonous book. The heavy odour of incense seemed to cling about
its pages and to trouble the brain. The mere cadence of the sentences, the subtle monotony of their music, so
full as it was of complex refrains and movements elaborately repeated, produced in the mind of the lad, as he
passed from chapter to chapter, a form of reverie, a malady of dreaming, that made him unconscious of the
falling day and creeping shadows. (X)
21) L’EDONISMO COME SUPERAMENTO DELL’ANTINOMIA ‘MISTICISMO VS MATERIALISMO’
But he never fell into the error of arresting his intellectual development by any formal acceptance of
creed or system, or of mistaking, for a house in which to live, an inn that is but suitable for the sojourn of a
night, or for a few hours of a night in which there are no stars and the moon is in travail. Mysticism, with its
marvellous power of making common things strange to us, and the subtle antinomianism that always seems
to accompany it, moved him for a season; and for a season he inclined to the materialistic doctrines of the
Darwinismus movement in Germany, and found a curious pleasure in tracing the thoughts and passions of
men to some pearly cell in the brain, or some white nerve in the body, delighting in the conception of the
absolute dependence of the spirit on certain physical conditions, morbid or healthy, normal or diseased. Yet,
as has been said of him before, no theory of life seemed to him to be of any importance compared with life
itself. He felt keenly conscious of how barren all intellectual speculation is when separated from action and
experiment. He knew that the senses, no less than the soul, have their spiritual mysteries to reveal.
And so he would now study perfumes and the secrets of their manufacture, distilling heavily scented
oils and burning odorous gums from the East. He saw that there was no mood of the mind that had not its
counterpart in the sensuous life, and set himself to discover their true relations, wondering what there was in
frankincense that made one mystical, and in ambergris that stirred one's passions, and in violets that woke the
memory of dead romances, and in musk that troubled the brain, and in champak that stained the imagination;
and seeking often to elaborate a real psychology of perfumes, and to estimate the several influences of sweetsmelling roots and scented, pollen-laden flowers; of aromatic balms and of dark and fragrant woods; of
spikenard, that sickens; of hovenia, that makes men mad; and of aloes, that are said to be able to expel
melancholy from the soul.
At another time he devoted himself entirely to music, and in a long latticed room, with a vermilionand-gold ceiling and walls of olive-green lacquer, he used to give curious concerts in which mad gipsies tore
wild music from little zithers, or grave, yellow-shawled Tunisians plucked at the strained strings of
monstrous lutes, while grinning Negroes beat monotonously upon copper drums and, crouching upon scarlet
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mats, slim turbaned Indians blew through long pipes of reed or brass and charmed--or feigned to charm-great hooded snakes and horrible horned adders. The harsh intervals and shrill discords of barbaric music
stirred him at times when Schubert's grace, and Chopin's beautiful sorrows, and the mighty harmonies of
Beethoven himself, fell unheeded on his ear. […] (XI)
22) INSINCERITÀ E MOLTIPLICAZIONE DELLA PERSONALITÀ
[…] For the canons of good society are, or should be, the same as the canons of art. Form is absolutely
essential to it. It should have the dignity of a ceremony, as well as its unreality, and should combine the
insincere character of a romantic play with the wit and beauty that make such plays delightful to us. Is
insincerity such a terrible thing? I think not. It is merely a method by which we can multiply our
personalities.
Such, at any rate, was Dorian Gray's opinion. He used to wonder at the shallow psychology of those
who conceive the ego in man as a thing simple, permanent, reliable, and of one essence. To him, man was a
being with myriad lives and myriad sensations, a complex multiform creature that bore within itself strange
legacies of thought and passion, and whose very flesh was tainted with the monstrous maladies of the dead.
(XI)
23) IL MALE COME REALIZZAZIONE DELLA BELLEZZA
Dorian Gray had been poisoned by a book. There were moments when he looked on evil simply as a mode
through which he could realize his conception of the beautiful. (XI)
24) IL PRINCIPE E IL SATIRO
"I don't believe it is my picture."
"Can't you see your ideal in it?" said Dorian bitterly.
"My ideal, as you call it..."
"As you called it."
"There was nothing evil in it, nothing shameful. You were to me such an ideal as I shall never meet
again. This is the face of a satyr."
"It is the face of my soul."
"Christ! what a thing I must have worshipped! It has the eyes of a devil."
"Each of us has heaven and hell in him, Basil," cried Dorian with a wild gesture of despair. (XIII)
25) LA MEMORIA E COLPA
Dorian winced and looked round at the grotesque things that lay in such fantastic postures on the
ragged mattresses. The twisted limbs, the gaping mouths, the staring lustreless eyes, fascinated him. He
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knew in what strange heavens they were suffering, and what dull hells were teaching them the secret of some
new joy. They were better off than he was. He was prisoned in thought. Memory, like a horrible malady, was
eating his soul away. From time to time he seemed to see the eyes of Basil Hallward looking at him. Yet he
felt he could not stay. The presence of Adrian Singleton troubled him. He wanted to be where no one would
know who he was. He wanted to escape from himself. (XVI)
26) LA PASSIONE PER IL PECCATO
There are moments, psychologists tell us, when the passion for sin, or for what the world calls sin, so
dominates a nature that every fibre of the body, as every cell of the brain, seems to be instinct with fearful
impulses. Men and women at such moments lose the freedom of their will. They move to their terrible end as
automatons move. Choice is taken from them, and conscience is either killed, or, if it lives at all, lives but to
give rebellion its fascination and disobedience its charm. For all sins, as theologians weary not of reminding
us, are sins of disobedience. When that high spirit, that morning star of evil, fell from heaven, it was as a
rebel that he fell. (XVI)
27) LA CONSAPEVOLEZZA PECCATO ORIGINALE: LA BELLEZZA
Ah! in what a monstrous moment of pride and passion he had prayed that the portrait should bear the
burden of his days, and he keep the unsullied splendour of eternal youth! All his failure had been due to that.
Better for him that each sin of his life had brought its sure swift penalty along with it. There was purification
in punishment. Not "Forgive us our sins" but "Smite us for our iniquities" should be the prayer of man to a
most just God.
The curiously carved mirror that Lord Henry had given to him, so many years ago now, was standing
on the table, and the white-limbed Cupids laughed round it as of old. He took it up, as he had done on that
night of horror when he had first noted the change in the fatal picture, and with wild, tear-dimmed eyes
looked into its polished shield. Once, some one who had terribly loved him had written to him a mad letter,
ending with these idolatrous words: "The world is changed because you are made of ivory and gold. The
curves of your lips rewrite history." The phrases came back to his memory, and he repeated them over and
over to himself. Then he loathed his own beauty, and flinging the mirror on the floor, crushed it into silver
splinters beneath his heel. It was his beauty that had ruined him, his beauty and the youth that he had prayed
for. But for those two things, his life might have been free from stain. His beauty had been to him but a
mask, his youth but a mockery. What was youth at best? A green, an unripe time, a time of shallow moods,
and sickly thoughts. Why had he worn its livery? Youth had spoiled him. (XX)
28) LIBERAZIONE DAL QUADRO-COSCIENZA
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But this murder--was it to dog him all his life? Was he always to be burdened by his past? Was he
really to confess? Never. There was only one bit of evidence left against him. The picture itself--that was
evidence. He would destroy it. Why had he kept it so long? Once it had given him pleasure to watch it
changing and growing old. Of late he had felt no such pleasure. It had kept him awake at night. When he had
been away, he had been filled with terror lest other eyes should look upon it. It had brought melancholy
across his passions. Its mere memory had marred many moments of joy. It had been like conscience to him.
Yes, it had been conscience. He would destroy it.
He looked round and saw the knife that had stabbed Basil Hallward. He had cleaned it many times, till
there was no stain left upon it. It was bright, and glistened. As it had killed the painter, so it would kill the
painter's work, and all that that meant. It would kill the past, and when that was dead, he would be free. It
would kill this monstrous soul-life, and without its hideous warnings, he would be at peace. He seized the
thing, and stabbed the picture with it. (XX)
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IMPRESSIONISMO NARRATIVO – CONRAD E FORD MADOX FORD
1- We agreed that a poem was not that which was written in verse but that, either prose or verse, that had
constructive beauty. We agreed that the writing of novels was the one thing of importance that remained to
the world and that what the novel needed was the New Form. We confessed that each of us desired one day
to write Absolute Prose… But that which really brought us together was devotion to Flaubert and
Maupassant. (Ford, “Collaborating with Conrad”)
2- Fiction – if it at all aspires to be art – appeals to temperament. And in truth it must be, like painting, like
music, like all art, the appeal of one temperament to all the other innumerable temperaments whose subtle
and resistless power endows passing events with their true meaning, and creates the moral, the emotional
atmosphere of the place and time. Such an appeal to be effective must be an impression conveyed through
the senses; and, in fact, it cannot be made in any other way, because temperament, whether individual or
collective, is not amenable to persuasion. All art, therefore, appeals primarily to the senses, and the artistic
aim when expressing itself in written words must also make its appeal through the senses, if its high desire is
to reach the secret spring of responsive emotions. It must strenuously aspire to the plasticity of sculpture, to
the colour of painting, and to the magic suggestiveness of music – which is the art of arts. And it is only
through complete, unswerving devotion to the perfect blending of form and substance; it is only through an
unremitting never-discouraged care for the shape and ring of sentences that an approach can be made to
plasticity, to colour, and that the light of magic suggestiveness may be brought to play for an evanescent
instant over the commonplace surface of words: of the old, old words, worn thin, defaced by ages of careless
usage. (Joseph Conrad, “Preface” to The Nigger of the Narcissus)
3- […] Indeed, I suppose that Impressionism exists to render those queer effects of real life that are like so
many views seen through bright glass – through glass so bright that whilst you perceive through it a
landscape or a backyard, you are aware that, on its surface, it reflects a face of a person behind you. For the
whole of life is really like that; we are almost always in one place with our minds somewhere quite other.
(Ford, “On Impressionism”, 1914)
3- […] The point is that any piece of Impressionism, whether it be prose, or verse, or painting, or sculpture,
is the record of the impression of a moment; it is not a sort of rounded, annotated record of a set of
circumstances – it is the record of the recollection in your mind of a set of circumstances that happened ten
years ago – or ten minutes. It might even be the impression of the moment – but it is the impression, not the
corrected chronicle. (Ford, “On Impressionism”, 1914)
4- […] Thus an Impressionist in a novel, or in a poem, will never render a long speech of one of his
characters verbatim, because the mind of the reader would at once lose some of the illusion of the good faith
of the narrator. The mind of the reader will say: “Hullo, this fellow is faking this. he cannot possibly
remember such a long speech word for word.” The Impressionist, therefore, will only record his impression
of a long speech. (Ford, “On Impressionism”, 1914)
5- […] In that way you would attain to the sort of odd vibration that scenes in real life really have; you
would give your reader the impression that he was witnessing something real, that he was passing through an
experience… You will observe also that you will have produced something that is very like a Futurist picture
– not a Cubist picture – but one of those canvases that show you in one corner a pair of stays, in another a bit
of the foyer of a music-hall, in another a fragment of early morning landscape, and in the middle a pair of
eyes, the whole bearing the title “A Night out”. And indeed, those Futurists are only trying to render on
canvas what Impressionists tel que moi have been trying to render for many years. (You may remember
Emma’s love scene at the cattle show in Madame Bovary).
Do not, I beg you, be led away by the English reviewer’s cant phrase to the effect that the Futurists
are trying to be literary and the plastic arts can never be literary. Les Jeunes of to-day are trying all sorts of
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experiments, in all sorts of media. And they are perfectly right to be trying them. Ford, “On Impressionism”,
1914)
6- […] And the whole of Impressions comes to this: having realized that the audience to which you will
address yourself must have this particular peasant intelligence, or, if you prefer it, this particular and virgin
openness of mind, you will then figure to yourself an individual, a silent listener, who shall be to yourself the
homo bonae voluntatis – man of goodwill. To him, then, you will address your picture, your poem, your
prose story, or your argument. You will seek to capture his interest; you will seek to hold his interest. You
will do this by methods of surprise, of fatigue, by passages of sweetness in your language, by passages
suggesting the sudden and brutal shock of suicide. You will give him passages of dullness, so that your
bright effects may seem more bright; you will alternate, you will dwell for a long time upon an intimate
point; you will seek to exasperate so that you may the better enchant. You will, in short, employ all the
devices of the prostitute. (Ford, “On Impressionism”, 1914)
7- […] But one point is very important. The artist can never write to satisfy himself – to get, as the saying is,
something off the chest. He must not write propaganda which it is his desire to write; he must not write
rolling periods, the production of which gives him a soothing feeling in his digestive organs or wherever it is.
He must write always so as to satisfy that other fellow – that other fellow who has too clear an intelligence to
let his attention be captured or his mind deceived by special pleadings in favour of any given dogma. (Ford,
“On Impressionism”, 1914)
8[…] He was before all things the artist and his chief message to mankind is set at the head of this
charter… “it is before all things to make you see…” Seeing is believing for all the doubters of this planet,
from Thomas to the end: if you can make humanity see the few very simple things upon which this temporal
world rests you will make mankind believe such eternal truths as are universal…
That message, that the province of written art is above all things to make you see was given before
we met: it was because that same belief was previously and so profoundly held by the writer that we could
work for so long together. We had the same aims and we had all the time the same aims. Our attributes were
no doubt different. The writer probably knew more about words, but Conrad had certainly an infinitely
greater hold over the architectonics of the novel, over the way a story should be built up so that its interest
progresses and grows up to the last word. […] (Ford, Joseph Conrad. A Personal Remembrance, 1924)
9- […] And the real difference between the writers of the Impressionist group, who since the days of
Flaubert have dominated the public mind, and their predecessors is that the post-Flaubertians have studies,
primarily, to hold just that public mind, whilst their predecessors, though wishing obviously to be read, never
gave a thought to how interest may be inevitably – and almost scientifically – aroused. (Ford, Techniques,
1935)
10- […] The main difference between a novel by the forgotten James Payne – who in his day was a much
respected and not too popular novelist – and a work of the unforgettable author of The Turn of the Screw,
who also, you will observe was a much respected and certainly not too popular novelist, is that the one
recounts whilst the other presents. The one makes statements; the other builds suggestions of happenings on
suggestions of happenings. (Ford, Techniques, 1935)
11- […] It would be idle to say that it was Flaubert who first observed that the intrusion of the author
destroyed the illusion of the reader. Such ideas arise sporadically across the literary landscape and get finally
adopted by one or other of the distinguished though, long before that, they will have been in the air. And
Flaubert more than any of his associates clamoured unceasingly and passionately that the author must be
impersonal, must, like a creating deity, stand neither for nor against any of his characters, must project and
never report and must, above all, forever keep himself out of his books. He must write his books as if he
were rendering the impressions of a person present at a scene; he must remember that a person present at a
scene does not see everything and is above all not able to remember immensely long passages of dialogue.
These dicta were unceasingly discussed by the members of Flaubert’s set who included the
Goncourts, Turgenev, Gautier, Maupassant and, in a lesser degree, Zola and the young James – this last as
disciple of the gentle Russian genius. […] And in those coenaculae the modern novel – the immensely
powerful engine of our civilization – was born. (Ford, Techniques, 1935)
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12- […] It is said that James directly influenced Conrad in his incessant search for a new form for the novel.
Nothing could be more literally false but nothing could be more impressionistically true. […] And if Conrad,
as is literally true, learned nothing directly of James, yet he found prepared for him a medium in which,
slowly at first but with an always increasing impetus, his works could spread. It was the London of the
Yellow Book, of R.L. Stevenson, that sedulous ape, of W.E. Henley, that harsh-mouthed but very beneficent
spreader of French influences.
It was a city of infinite curiosity as to new literary methods and of an infinite readiness to assimilate
new ideas, whether they came from Paris by way of Ernest Dowson, from Poland by way of Conrad, or from
New York or New England by way of Henry James, Stephen Crane, Harold Frederick, or Whistler, Abbey,
Sargent, and George Boughton. London had in fact been visited by one of its transitory phases in which
nothing seemed good but what came from abroad. We were to see another such phase in ’13 and ’14 in the
flowering days of Ezra Pound, John Gould Fletcher, Robert Frost, Marinetti, the Cubists, the Vorticists, and
how many other foreign movements that were to be crushed in the bud by the iron shards of war. We may
see another tomorrow. At any rate it is overdue. (Ford, Techniques, 1935)
13- […] But it was perhaps Crane of all that school or gang – and not excepting Maupassant – who most
observed that canon of Impressionism: “You must render: never report.” You must never, that is to say,
write: “We saw a man aim a gat at him”; you must put it: “He saw a steel ring directed at him.” Later you
must get in that, in his subconsciousness, he recognized that the steel ring was the polished muzzle of a
revolver. So Crane rendered it in Three White Mice which is one of the major short stories of the world. This
is Impressionism! (Ford, Techniques, 1935)
14- […] Conrad, I may say, was more interested in finding a new form for the novel; I, in training myself to
write just words that would not stick out of a sentence and so distract the reader’s attention by their very
justness. But we worked ceaselessly, together, on those problems, turning from the problem of the new form
to that of the just word as soon as we were mentally exhausted by the one or the other.
That we did succeed eventually in finding a new form I think I may permit myself to claim, Conrad
first evolving the convention of a Marlow who should narrate, in presentation, the whole story of a novel just
as, without such sequence or pursued chronology, a story will come up into the mind of a narrator, and I
eventually dispensing with a narrator buy making the story come up in the mind of the unseen author with a
similar want of chronological sequence. […]
We evolved then a convention for the novel and one that I think still stands. The novel must be put
into the mouth of a narrator – who must be limited by probability as to what he can know of the affair that he
is adumbrating. Or it must be left to the official Author and he, being almost omnipotent, ma, so long as he
limits himself to presenting without comment or moralization, allow himself to be considered to know
almost everything that there is to know. The narration is thus a little more limited in possibilities; the
‘author’s book’ is a little more difficult to handle. A narrator, that is to say, being already a fictional
character, may indulge in any prejudices or wrong-headedness and any likings or dislikes for the other
characters of the book, for he is just a living being like anybody else. But an author-creator, presenting his
narration without passion, may not indulge in the expression of any prejudices or like any one of his
characters more than any other; for, if he displays either of those weaknesses, he will to that extent weaken
the illusion that he was attempted to build up. Marlow, the narrator of Lord Jim, may idolize his hero or
anathemize his villains with the sole result that we say: “How real Marlow is!’ Conrad, however, in
Nostromo must not let any word or preference to Nostromo or Mrs Gould or the daughters of the Garibaldino
pierce through the surface of his novel or at once we should say: “here is the tiresome person intruding
again,” and at once lose the thread of the tale.” (Ford, Techniques, 1935)
15- […] We were, in short, producers who thought forever of the consumer. If Conrad laid it down as a law
that, in introducing a character, we must always, after a few vivid words of personal description, affording to
him a speech that must be a characteristic generalization, it was because we were thinking of You. We knew
that we said: “Mr X was a foul-mouthed reactionary,” you would know very little about him. But if his first
words, after his introduction were: “God damn it, put all filthy Liberals up against a wall, say I, and shoot out
their beastly livers…” that gentleman will make on you an impression that many following pages shall
scarcely efface. Whomever else you may not quite grasp, you won’t forget him – because that is the way
people present themselves in real life. (Ford, Techniques, 1935)
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16- […] Similarly, in evolving a technique for the presenting of conversation, I – and in this it was rather I
than Conrad, just as in the evolution of the New Form it was rather Conrad than I, though each countersigned
the opinion of the other and thenceforth adopted the device so evolved – I then considered for a long time
how conversations presented themselves to the mind. I would find myself in a room with a gentleman who
pursued an almost uninterrupted monologue. A week after, I would find that of it I retained, verbally, only
his more characteristic expletives – his ‘God bless my soul’s’, or his ‘You don’t mean to say so’s’ and one or
two short direct speeches: “If the Government goes to the country, I will bet a hundredweight of China tea to
a Maltese orange that they will have a fifty-eight to forty-two majority of voters against them.” But I
remembered the whole gist of his remarks.
And so, considering that an author-narrator, being supposed to have about the mnemonic powers of a
man with a fair memory, will after the elapse of a certain period, be supposed to retain about that much of a
conversation that the Reader may suppose to have heard, I shall, when inventing conversations, give about
just that proportion of direct and indirect speech, in which latter I shall present the gist of my character’s
argument… (Ford, Techniques, 1935)
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JOSEPH CONRAD, da Heart of Darkenss (1900)
INCIPIT
Cornice:
1) The NELLIE, a cruising yawl, swung to her anchor without a flutter of the sails, and was at rest. The flood
had made, the wind was nearly calm, and being bound down the river, the only thing for it was to come to
and wait for the turn of the tide.
The sea-reach of the Thames stretched before us like the beginning of an interminable waterway. In the
offing the sea and the sky were welded together without a joint, and in the luminous space the tanned sails of
the barges drifting up with the tide seemed to stand still in red clusters of canvas sharply peaked, with gleams
of varnished sprits. A haze rested on the low shores that ran out to sea in vanishing flatness. The air was dark
above Gravesend, and farther back still seemed condensed into a mournful gloom, brooding motionless over
the biggest, and the greatest, town on earth.
2) Marlow sat cross-legged right aft, leaning against the mizzen-mast. He had sunken cheeks, a yellow
complexion, a straight back, an ascetic aspect, and, with his arms dropped, the palms of hands outwards,
resembled an idol.
3) And at last, in its curved and imperceptible fall, the sun sank low, and from glowing white changed to a
dull red without rays and without heat, as if about to go out suddenly, stricken to death by the touch of that
gloom brooding over a crowd of men.
4) Hunters for gold or pursuers of fame, they all had gone out on that stream, bearing the sword, and often
the torch, messengers of the might within the land, bearers of a spark from the sacred fire. What greatness
had not floated on the ebb of that river into the mystery of an unknown earth! . . . The dreams of men, the
seed of commonwealths, the germs of empires.
5) And farther west on the upper reaches the place of the monstrous town was still marked ominously on the
sky, a brooding gloom in sunshine, a lurid glare under the stars.
6) But Marlow was not typical (if his propensity to spin yarns be excepted), and to him the meaning of an
episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow
brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of these misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral
illumination of moonshine.
7) Land in a swamp, march through the woods, and in some inland post feel the savagery, the utter savagery,
had closed round him -- all that mysterious life of the wilderness that stirs in the forest, in the jungles, in the
hearts of wild men. There's no initiation either into such mysteries. He has to live in the midst of the
incomprehensible, which is also detestable. And it has a fascination, too, that goes to work upon him. The
fascination of the abomination -- you know, imagine the growing regrets, the longing to escape, the
powerless disgust, the surrender, the hate."
8) The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different
complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much.
What redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the back of it; not a sentimental pretence but an idea; and an
unselfish belief in the idea -- something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to. . . ."
RACCONTO INTERNO:
NELLA CITTA’ SEPOLCRALE
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9) "I don't want to bother you much with what happened to me personally," he began, showing in this remark
the weakness of many tellers of tales who seem so often unaware of what their audience would like best to
hear; "yet to understand the effect of it on me you ought to know how I got out there, what I saw, how I went
up that river to the place where I first met the poor chap. It was the farthest point of navigation and the
culminating point of my experience. It seemed somehow to throw a kind of light on everything about me -and into my thoughts. It was sombre enough, too -- and pitiful -- not extraordinary in any way -- not very
clear either. No, not very clear. And yet it seemed to throw a kind of light.
10) "True, by this time it was not a blank space any more. It had got filled since my boyhood with rivers and
lakes and names. It had ceased to be a blank space of delightful mystery -- a white patch for a boy to dream
gloriously over. It had become a place of darkness. But there was in it one river especially, a mighty big
river, that you could see on the map, resembling an immense snake uncoiled, with its head in the sea, its
body at rest curving afar over a vast country, and its tail lost in the depths of the land. And as I looked at the
map of it in a shop-window, it fascinated me as a snake would a bird -- a silly little bird. Then I remembered
there was a big concern, a Company for trade on that river. Dash it all! I thought to myself, they can't trade
without using some kind of craft on that lot of fresh water -- steamboats! Why shouldn't I try to get charge of
one? I went on along Fleet Street, but could not shake off the idea. The snake had charmed me.
11) [Fresleven] had been a couple of years already out there engaged in the noble cause, you know, and he
probably felt the need at last of asserting his self-respect in some way.
12) "A narrow and deserted street in deep shadow, high houses, innumerable windows with venetian blinds,
a dead silence, grass sprouting right and left, immense double doors standing ponderously ajar.
13) I was going into the yellow. Dead in the centre. And the river was there -- fascinating -- deadly -- like a
snake.
14) The old one sat on her chair. Her flat cloth slippers were propped up on a foot-warmer, and a cat reposed
on her lap. She wore a starched white affair on her head, had a wart on one cheek, and silver-rimmed
spectacles hung on the tip of her nose. She glanced at me above the glasses. The swift and indifferent
placidity of that look troubled me. Two youths with foolish and cheery countenances were being piloted
over, and she threw at them the same quick glance of unconcerned wisdom. She seemed to know all about
them and about me, too. An eerie feeling came over me She seemed uncanny and fateful. Often far away
there I thought of these two, guarding the door of Darkness, knitting black wool as for a warm pall, one
introducing, introducing continuously to the unknown, the other scrutinizing the cheery and foolish faces
with unconcerned old eyes. AVE! Old knitter of black wool. MORITURI TE SALUTANT. Not many of
those she looked at ever saw her again -- not half, by a long way.
15) In the tropics one must before everything keep calm.'. . . He lifted a warning forefinger. . . . 'DU
CALME, DU CALME. ADIEU.'
16) In the course of these confidences it became quite plain to me I had been represented to the wife of the
high dignitary, and goodness knows to how many more people besides, as an exceptional and gifted creature
-- a piece of good fortune for the Company -- a man you don't get hold of every day. Good heavens! and I
was going to take charge of a two-penny-half-penny river-steamboat with a penny whistle attached! It
appeared, however, I was also one of the Workers, with a capital -- you know. Something like an emissary of
light, something like a lower sort of apostle. There had been a lot of such rot let loose in print and talk just
about that time, and the excellent woman, living right in the rush of all that humbug, got carried off her feet.
She talked about 'weaning those ignorant millions from their horrid ways,' till, upon my word, she made me
quite uncomfortable. I ventured to hint that the Company was run for profit. "'You forget, dear Charlie, that
the labourer is worthy of his hire,' she said, brightly.
17) It's queer how out of touch with truth women are. They live in a world of their own, and there has never
been anything like it, and never can be. It is too beautiful altogether, and if they were to set it up it would go
to pieces before the first sunset. Some confounded fact we men have been living contentedly with ever since
the day of creation would start up and knock the whole thing over.
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IL VIAGGIO:
SENSO DI ILLUSIONE E DI IRREALTA’ (LA COSTA):
18) In the empty immensity of earth, sky, and water, there she was, incomprehensible, firing into a continent.
Pop, would go one of the six-inch guns; a small flame would dart and vanish, a little white smoke would
disappear, a tiny projectile would give a feeble screech -- and nothing happened. Nothing could happen.
There was a touch of insanity in the proceeding a sense of lugubrious drollery in the sight; and it was not
dissipated by somebody on board assuring me earnestly there was a camp of natives -- he called them
enemies! -- hidden out of sight somewhere.
LA PRIMA STAZIONE:
19) A rocky cliff appeared, mounds of turned-up earth by the shore, houses on a hill, others with iron roofs,
amongst a waste of excavations, or hanging to the declivity. A continuous noise of the rapids above hovered
over this scene of inhabited devastation. A lot of people, mostly black and naked, moved about like ants. A
jetty projected into the river. A blinding sunlight drowned all this at times in a sudden recrudescence of
glare. 'There's your Company's station,' said the Swede, pointing to three wooden barrack-like structures on
the rocky slope. 'I will send your things up. Four boxes did you say? So. Farewell.'
20) Behind this raw matter one of the reclaimed, the product of the new forces at work, strolled
despondently, carrying a rifle by its middle. He had a uniform jacket with one button off, and seeing a white
man on the path, hoisted his weapon to his shoulder with alacrity. This was simple prudence, white men
being so much alike at a distance that he could not tell who I might be. He was speedily reassured, and with a
large, white, rascally grin, and a glance at his charge, seemed to take me into partnership in his exalted trust.
After all, I also was a part of the great cause of these high and just proceedings.
21) But as I stood on this hillside, I foresaw that in the blinding sunshine of that land I would become
acquainted with a flabby, pretending, weak-eyed devil of a rapacious and pitiless folly) How insidious he
could be, too, I was only to find out several months later and a thousand miles farther.
22) These moribund shapes were free as air –and nearly as thin. I began to distinguish the gleam of the eyes
under the trees. Then, glancing down, I saw a face near my hand. The black bones reclined at full length with
one shoulder against the tree, and slowly the eyelids rose and the sunken eyes looked up at me, enormous
and vacant, a kind of blind, white flicker in the depths of the orbs, which died out slowly. The man seemed
young -- almost a boy -- but you know with them it's hard to tell. I found nothing else to do but to offer him
one of my good Swede's ship's biscuits I had in my pocket. The fingers closed slowly on it and held -- there
was no other movement and no other glance.
23) "One day he remarked, without lifting his head, 'In the interior you will no doubt meet Mr. Kurtz.' On my
asking who Mr. Kurtz was, he said he was a first-class agent; and seeing my disappointment at this
information, he added slowly, laying down his pen, 'He is a very remarkable person.' Further questions
elicited from him that Mr. Kurtz was at present in charge of a trading-post, a very important one, in the true
ivory-country, at 'the very bottom of there. Sends in as much ivory as all the others put together . . .' He
began to write again. The sick man was too ill to groan. The flies buzzed in a great peace.
24) 'When you see Mr. Kurtz' he went on, 'tell him from me that everything here' -- he glanced at the deck -'is very satisfactory. I don't like to write to him -- with those messengers of ours you never know who may
get hold of your letter -- at that Central Station.' He stared at me for a moment with his mild, bulging eyes.
'Oh, he will go far, very far,' he began again. 'He will be a somebody in the Administration before long.
They, above -- the Council in Europe, you know -- mean him to be.'
MARLOW PARTE CON UNA CAROVANA DI 60 UOMINI
LA STAZIONE CENTRALE:
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25) I interrupted him by saying I had heard of Mr. Kurtz on the coast. 'Ah! So they talk of him down there,'
he murmured to himself. Then he began again, assuring me Mr. Kurtz was the best agent he had, an
exceptional man, of the greatest importance to the Company; therefore I could understand his anxiety. He
was, he said, 'very, very uneasy.'
26) I went to work the next day, turning, so to speak, my back on that station. In that way only it seemed to
me I could keep my hold on the redeeming facts of life. Still, one must look about sometimes; and then I saw
this station, these men strolling aimlessly about in the sunshine of the yard. I asked myself sometimes what it
all meant. They wandered here and there with their absurd long staves in their hands, like a lot of faithless
pilgrims bewitched inside a rotten fence. The word 'ivory' rang in the air, was whispered, was sighed. You
would think they were praying to it. A taint of imbecile rapacity blew through it all, like a whiff from some
corpse. By Jove! I've never seen anything so unreal in my life. And outside, the silent wilderness surrounding
this cleared speck on the earth struck me as something great and invincible, like evil or truth, waiting
patiently for the passing away of this fantastic invasion.
27) Mr. Kurtz had painted this -- in this very station more than a year ago -- while waiting for means to go to
his trading post. 'Tell me, pray,' said I, 'who is this Mr. Kurtz?' "'The chief of the Inner Station,' he answered
in a short tone, looking away. 'Much obliged,' I said, laughing. 'And you are the brickmaker of the Central
Station. Every one knows that.' He was silent for a while. 'He is a prodigy,' he said at last. 'He is an emissary
of pity and science and progress, and devil knows what else. We want,' he began to declaim suddenly, 'for
the guidance of the cause intrusted to us by Europe, so to speak, higher intelligence, wide sympathies, a
singleness of purpose.' 'Who says that?' I asked. 'Lots of them,' he replied. 'Some even write that; and so HE
comes here, a special being, as you ought to know.' 'Why ought I to know?' I interrupted, really surprised. He
paid no attention. 'Yes. To-day he is chief of the best station, next year he will be assistant-manager, two
years more and . . . but I dare-say you know what he will be in two years' time. You are of the new gang -the gang of virtue. The same people who sent him specially also recommended you.
28) Beyond the fence the forest stood up spectrally in the moonlight, and through that dim stir, through the
faint sounds of that lamentable courtyard, the silence of the land went home to one's very heart -- its mystery,
its greatness, the amazing reality of its concealed life. The hurt nigger moaned feebly somewhere near by,
and then fetched a deep sigh that made me mend my pace away from there.
29) The smell of mud, of primeval mud, by Jove! was in my nostrils, the high stillness of primeval forest was
before my eyes; there were shiny patches on the black creek. The moon had spread over everything a thin
layer of silver -- over the rank grass, over the mud, upon the wall of matted vegetation standing higher than
the wall of a temple, over the great river I could see through a sombre gap glittering, glittering, as it flowed
broadly by without a murmur. All this was great, expectant, mute, while the man jabbered about himself. I
wondered whether the stillness on the face of the immensity looking at us two were meant as an appeal or as
a menace. What were we who had strayed in here? Could we handle that dumb thing, or would it handle us?
I felt how big, how confoundedly big, was that thing that couldn't talk, and perhaps was deaf as well What
was in there? I could see a little ivory coming out from there, and I had heard Mr. Kurtz was in there. I had
heard enough about it, too -- God knows! Yet somehow it didn't bring any image with it -- no more than if I
had been told an angel or a fiend was in there
30) It had become so pitch dark that we listeners could hardly see one another. For a long time already he,
sitting apart, had been no more to us than a voice. There was not a word from anybody. The others might
have been asleep, but I was awake. I listened, I listened on the watch for the sentence, for the word, that
would give me the clue to the faint uneasiness inspired by this narrative that seemed to shape itself without
human lips in the heavy night-air of the river.
31) We capered on the iron deck. A frightful clatter came out of that hulk, and the virgin forest on the other
bank of the creek sent it back in a thundering roll upon the sleeping station. It must have made some of the
pilgrims sit up in their hovels. A dark figure obscured the lighted doorway of the manager's hut, vanished,
then, a second or so after, the doorway itself vanished, too. We stopped, and the silence driven away by the
stamping of our feet flowed back again from the recesses of the land. The great wall of vegetation, an
exuberant and entangled mass of trunks, branches, leaves, boughs, festoons, motionless in the moonlight,
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was like a rioting invasion of soundless life, a rolling wave of plants, piled up, crested, ready to topple over
the creek, to sweep every little man of us out of his little existence. And it moved not. A deadened burst of
mighty splashes and snorts reached us from afar, as though an icthyosaurus had been taking a bath of glitter
in the great river.
32) I had plenty of time for meditation, and now and then I would give some thought to Kurtz. I wasn't very
interested in him. No. Still, I was curious to see whether this man, who had come out equipped with moral
ideas of some sort, would climb to the top after all and how he would set about his work when there."
33) One evening as I was lying flat on the deck of my steamboat, I heard voices approaching -- and there
were the nephew and the uncle strolling along the bank. I laid my head on my arm again, and had nearly lost
myself in a doze, when somebody said in my ear, as it were: 'I am as harmless as a little child, but I don't like
to be dictated to. Am I the manager -- or am I not? I was ordered to send him there. It's incredible.' . . . I
became aware that the two were standing on the shore alongside the forepart of the steamboat, just below my
head. I did not move; it did not occur to me to move: I was sleepy. 'It IS unpleasant,' grunted the uncle. 'He
has asked the Administration to be sent there,' said the other, 'with the idea of showing what he could do; and
I was instructed accordingly. Look at the influence that man must have. Is it not frightful?' They both agreed
it was frightful, then made several bizarre remarks: 'Make rain and fine weather -- one man -- the Council -by the nose' -- bits of absurd sentences that got the better of my drowsiness, so that I had pretty near the
whole of my wits about me when the uncle said, 'The climate may do away with this difficulty for you. Is he
alone there?' 'Yes,' answered the manager; 'he sent his assistant down the river with a note to me in these
terms: "Clear this poor devil out of the country, and don't bother sending more of that sort. I had rather be
alone than have the kind of men you can dispose of with me." It was more than a year ago. Can you imagine
such impudence!' 'Anything since then?' asked the other hoarsely. 'Ivory,' jerked the nephew; 'lots of it -prime sort -- lots -- most annoying, from him.' 'And with that?' questioned the heavy rumble. 'Invoice,' was
the reply fired out, so to speak. Then silence. They had been talking about Kurtz.
34) As to me, I seemed to see Kurtz for the first time. It was a distinct glimps: the dugout, four paddling
savages, and the lone white man turning his back suddenly on the headquarters, on relief, on thoughts of
home -- perhaps; setting his face towards the depths of the wilderness, towards his empty and desolate
station. I did not know the motive. Perhaps he was just simply a fine fellow who stuck to his work for its
own sake. His name, you understand, had not been pronounced once. He was 'that man.' The half-caste, who,
as far as I could see, had conducted a difficult trip with great prudence and pluck, was invariably alluded to
as 'that scoundrel.' The 'scoundrel' had reported that the 'man' had been very ill -- had recovered imperfectly.
. . . The two below me moved away then a few paces, and strolled back and forth at some little distance. I
heard: 'Military post -- doctor -- two hundred miles -- quite alone now -- unavoidable delays -- nine months - no news -- strange rumours.' They approached again, just as the manager was saying, 'No one, as far as I
know, unless a species of wandering trader -- a pestilential fellow, snapping ivory from the natives.' Who
was it they were talking about now? I gathered in snatches that this was some man supposed to be in Kurtz's
district, and of whom the manager did not approve. 'We will not be free from unfair competition till one of
these fellows is hanged for an example,' he said. 'Certainly,' grunted the other; 'get him hanged! Why not?
Anything -- anything can be done in this country. That's what I say; nobody here, you understand, HERE,
can endanger your position. And why? You stand the climate -- you outlast them all The danger is in Europe;
but there before I left I took care to -- ' They moved off and whispered, then their voices rose again. 'The
extraordinary series of delays is not my fault. I did my best.' The fat man sighed. 'Very sad.' 'And the
pestiferous absurdity of his talk,' continued the other; 'he bothered me enough when he was here. "Each
station should be like a beacon on the road towards better things, a centre for trade of course, but also for
humanizing, improving, instructing." Conceive you -- that ass! And he wants to be manager! No, it's -- ' Here
he got choked by excessive indignation, and I lifted my head the least bit. I was surprised to see how near
they were -- right under me. I could have spat upon their hats. They were looking on the ground, absorbed in
thought. The manager was switching his leg with a slender twig: his sagacious relative lifted his head. 'You
have been well since you came out this time?' he asked. The other gave a start. 'Who? I? Oh! Like a charm -like a charm. But the rest -- oh, my goodness! All sick. They die so quick, too, that I haven't the time to send
them out of the country -- it's incredible!' 'Hm'm. Just so,' grunted the uncle. 'Ah! my boy, trust to this -- I
say, trust to this.' I saw him extend his short flipper of an arm for a gesture that took in the forest, the creek,
the mud, the river -- seemed to beckon with a dishonouring flourish before the sunlit face of the land a
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treacherous appeal to the lurking death, to the hidden evil, to the profound darkness of its heart. It was so
startling that I leaped to my feet and looked back at the edge of the forest, as though I had expected an
answer of some sort to that black display of confidence. You know the foolish notions that come to one
sometimes. The high stillness confronted these two figures with its ominous patience, waiting for the passing
away of a fantastic invasion.
RISALGONO IL FIUME
35) "Going up that river was like travelling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation
rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings. An empty stream, a great silence, an impenetrable forest.
The air was warm, thick, heavy, sluggish. There was no joy in the brilliance of sunshine. The long stretches
of the water-way ran on, deserted, into the gloom of over-shadowed distances. On silvery sand-banks hippos
and alligators sunned themselves side by side. The broadening waters flowed through a mob of wooded
islands; you lost your way on that river as you would in a desert, and butted all day long against shoals,
trying to find the channel, till you thought yourself bewitched and cut off for ever from everything you had
known once -- somewhere -- far away -- in another existence perhaps. There were moments when one's past
came back to one, as it will sometimes when you have not a moment to spare for yourself; but it came in the
shape of an unrestful and noisy dream, remembered with wonder amongst the overwhelming realities of this
strange world of plants, and water, and silence. And this stillness of life did not in the least resemble a peace.
It was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention. It looked at you with a
vengeful aspect. I got used to it afterwards; I did not see it any more; I had no time. I had to keep guessing at
the channel; I had to discern, mostly by inspiration, the signs of hidden banks; I watched for sunken stones; I
was learning to clap my teeth smartly before my heart flew out, when I shaved by a fluke some infernal sly
old snag that would have ripped the life out of the tin-pot steamboat and drowned all the pilgrims; I had to
keep a lookout for the signs of dead wood we could cut up in the night for next day's steaming. When you
have to attend to things of that sort, to the mere incidents of the surface, the reality -- the reality, I tell you –
fades.
36) Trees, trees, millions of trees, massive, immense, running up high; and at their foot, hugging the bank
against the stream, crept the little begrimed steamboat, like a sluggish beetle crawling on the floor of a lofty
portico. It made you feel very small, very lost, and yet it was not altogether depressing, that feeling. After all,
if you were small, the grimy beetle crawled on -- which was just what you wanted it to do. Where the
pilgrims imagined it crawled to I don't know. To some place where they expected to get something. I bet! For
me it crawled towards Kurtz -- exclusively; but when the steam-pipes started leaking we crawled very slow.
The reaches opened before us and closed behind, as if the forest had stepped leisurely across the water to bar
the way for our return. We penetrated deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness. It was very quiet there.
At night sometimes the roll of drums behind the curtain of trees would run up the river and remain sustained
faintly, as if hovering in the air high over our heads, till the first break of day. Whether it meant war, peace,
or prayer we could not tell . The dawns were heralded by the descent of a chill stillness; the wood-cutters
slept, their fires burned low; the snapping of a twig would make you start. We were wanderers on a
prehistoric earth, on an earth that wore the aspect of an unknown planet. We could have fancied ourselves
the first of men taking possession of an accursed inheritance, to be subdued at the cost of profound anguish
and of excessive toil. But suddenly, as we struggled round a bend, there would be a glimpse of rush walls, of
peaked grass-roofs, a burst of yells, a whirl of black limbs, a mass of hands clapping, of feet stamping, of
bodies swaying, of eyes rolling, under the droop of heavy and motionless foliage. The steamer toiled along
slowly on the edge of a black and incomprehensible frenzy. The pre-historic man was cursing us, praying to
us, welcoming us -- who could tell? We were cut off from the comprehension of our surroundings; we glided
past like phantoms, wondering and secretly appalled, as sane men would be before an enthusiastic outbreak
in a madhouse. We could not understand because we were too far and could not remember because we were
travelling in the night of first ages, of those ages that are gone, leaving hardly a sign -- and no memories.
A 50 MIGLIA A VALLE DELLA STAZIONE INTERNA:
37) The simple old sailor, with his talk of chains and purchases, made me forget the jungle and the pilgrims
in a delicious sensation of having come upon something unmistakably real. Such a book being there was
wonderful enough; but still more astounding were the notes pencilled in the margin, and plainly referring to
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the text. I couldn't believe my eyes! They were in cipher! Yes, it looked like cipher. Fancy a man lugging
with him a book of that description into this nowhere and studying it -- and making notes -- in cipher at that!
It was an extravagant mystery.
LA SERA DEL SECONDO GIORNO A 8 MIGLIA DALLA STAZIONE DI KURTZ
38) When the sun rose there was a white fog, very warm and clammy, and more blinding than the night. It
did not shift or drive; it was just there, standing all round you like something solid. At eight or nine, perhaps,
it lifted as a shutter lifts. We had a glimpse of the towering multitude of trees, of the immense matted jungle,
with the blazing little ball of the sun hanging over it -- all perfectly still -- and then the white shutter came
down again, smoothly, as if sliding in greased grooves. I ordered the chain, which we had begun to heave in,
to be paid out again. Before it stopped running with a muffled rattle, a cry, a very loud cry, as of infinite
desolation, soared slowly in the opaque air. It ceased. A complaining clamour, modulated in savage discords,
filled our ears. The sheer unexpectedness of it made my hair stir under my cap. I don't know how it struck the
others: to me it seemed as though the mist itself had screamed, so suddenly, and apparently from all sides at
once, did this tumultuous and mournful uproar arise. It culminated in a hurried outbreak of almost intolerably
excessive shrieking, which stopped short, leaving us stiffened in a variety of silly attitudes, and obstinately
listening to the nearly as appalling and excessive silence. 'Good God! What is the meaning -- ' stammered at
my elbow one of the pilgrims -- a little fat man, with sandy hair and red whiskers, who wore sidespring
boots, and pink pyjamas tucked into his socks. Two others remained open-mouthed a while minute, then
dashed into the little cabin, to rush out incontinently and stand darting scared glances, with Winchesters at
'ready' in their hands. What we could see was just the steamer we were on, her outlines blurred as though she
had been on the point of dissolving, and a misty strip of water, perhaps two feet broad, around her -- and that
was all. The rest of the world was nowhere, as far as our eyes and ears were concerned. Just nowhere. Gone,
disappeared; swept off without leaving a whisper or a shadow behind.
39) They still belonged to the beginnings of time -- had no inherited experience to teach them as it were), and
of course, as long as there was a piece of paper written over in accordance with some farcical law or other
made down the river, it didn't enter anybody's head to trouble how they would live. Certainly they had
brought with them some rotten hippo-meat, which couldn't have lasted very long, anyway, even if the
pilgrims hadn't, in the midst of a shocking hullabaloo, thrown a considerable quantity of it over-board. It
looked like a high-handed proceeding; but it was really a case of legitimate self-defence. You can't breathe
dead hippo waking, sleeping, and eating, and at the same time keep your precarious grip on existence.
Besides that, they had given them every week three pieces of brass wire, each about nine inches long; and the
theory was they were to buy their provisions with that currency in riverside villages. You can see how THAT
worked. There were either no villages, or the people were hostile, or the director, who like the rest of us fed
out of tins, with an occasional old he-goat thrown in, didn't want to stop the steamer for some more or less
recondite reason. So, unless they swallowed the wire itself, or made loops of it to snare the fishes with, I
don't see what good their extravagant salary could be to them. I must say it was paid with a regularity worthy
of a large and honourable trading company. For the rest, the only thing to eat -- though it didn't look eatable
in the least -- I saw in their possession was a few lumps of some stuff like half-cooked dough, of a dirty
lavender colour, they kept wrapped in leaves, and now and then swallowed a piece of, but so small that it
seemed done more for the looks of the thing than for any serious purpose of sustenance. Why in the name of
all the gnawing devils of hunger they didn't go for us -- they were thirty to five -- and have a good tuck-in for
once, amazes me now when I think of it. They were big powerful men, with not much capacity to weigh the
consequences, with courage, with strength, even yet, though their skins were no longer glossy and their
muscles no longer hard. And I saw that something restraining, one of those human secrets that baffle
probability, had come into play there. I looked at them with a swift quickening of interest -- not because it
occurred to me I might be eaten by them before very long, though I own to you that just then I perceived -- in
a new light, as it were -- how unwholesome the pilgrims looked, and I hoped, yes, I positively hoped, that my
aspect was not so -- what shall I say? -- so -- unappetizing: a touch of fantastic vanity which fitted well with
the dream-sensation that pervaded all my days at that time. Perhaps I had a little fever, too. One can't live
with one's finger everlastingly on one's pulse. I had often 'a little fever,' or a little touch of other things -- the
playful paw-strokes of the wilderness, the preliminary trifling before the more serious onslaught which came
in due course. Yes; I looked at them as you would on any human being, with a curiosity of their impulses,
motives, capacities, weaknesses, when brought to the test of an inexorable physical necessity. Restraint!
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What possible restraint? Was it superstition, disgust, patience, fear -- or some kind of primitive honour? No
fear can stand up to hunger, no patience can wear it out, disgust simply does not exist where hunger is; and
as to superstition, beliefs, and what you may call principles, they are less than chaff in a breeze. Don't you
know the devilry of lingering starvation, its exasperating torment, its black thoughts, its sombre and brooding
ferocity? Well, I do. It takes a man all his inborn strength to fight hunger properly. It's really easier to face
bereavement, dishonour, and the perdition of one's soul -- than this kind of prolonged hunger. Sad, but true.
And these chaps, too, had no earthly reason for any kind of scruple. Restraint! I would just as soon have
expected restraint from a hyena prowling amongst the corpses of a battlefield. But there was the fact facing
me -- the fact dazzling, to be seen, like the foam on the depths of the sea, like a ripple on an unfathomable
enigma, a mystery greater -- when I thought of it -- than the curious, inexplicable note of desperate grief in
this savage clamour that had swept by us on the river-bank, behind the blind whiteness of the fog.
40) "For the moment that was the dominant thought. There was a sense of extreme disappointment, as
though I had found out I had been striving after something altogether without a substance. I couldn't have
been more disgusted if I had travelled all this way for the sole purpose of talking with Mr. Kurtz. Talking
with . . . I flung one shoe overboard, and became aware that that was exactly what I had been looking
forward to -- a talk with Kurtz. I made the strange discovery that I had never imagined him as doing, you
know, but as discoursing I didn't say to myself, 'Now I will never see him,' or 'Now I will never shake him by
the hand,' but, 'Now I will never hear him.' The man presented himself as a voice. Not of course that I did not
connect him with some sort of action. Hadn't I been told in all the tones of jealousy and admiration that he
had collected, bartered, swindled, or stolen more ivory than all the other agents together? That was not the
point. The point was in his being a gifted creature, and that of all his gifts the one that stood out
preeminently, that carried with it a sense of real presence, was his ability to talk, his words -- the gift of
expression, the bewildering, the illuminating, the most exalted and the most contemptible, the pulsating
stream of light, or the deceitful flow from the heart of an impenetrable darkness.
41) My dear boys, what can you expect from a man who out of sheer nervousness had just flung overboard a
pair of new shoes! Now I think of it, it is amazing I did not shed tears. I am, upon the whole, proud of my
fortitude. I was cut to the quick at the idea of having lost the inestimable privilege of listening to the gifted
Kurtz. Of course I was wrong. The privilege was waiting for me. Oh, yes, I heard more than enough. And I
was right, too. A voice. He was very little more than a voice. And I heard -- him -- it -- this voice -- other
voices -- all of them were so little more than voices -- and the memory of that time itself lingers around me,
impalpable, like a dying vibration of one immense jabber, silly, atrocious, sordid, savage, or simply mean,
without any kind of sense. Voices, voices -- even the girl herself -- now -- "
He was silent for a long time.
"I laid the ghost of his gifts at last with a lie," he began, suddenly. "Girl! What? Did I mention a girl? Oh,
she is out of it -- completely. They -- the women, I mean -- are out of it – should be out of it. We must help
them to stay in that beautiful world of their own, lest ours gets worse. Oh, she had to be out of it. You should
have heard the disinterred body of Mr. Kurtz saying, 'My Intended.' You would have perceived directly then
how completely she was out of it. And the lofty frontal bone of Mr. Kurtz! They say the hair goes on
growing sometimes, but this -- ah -- specimen, was impressively bald. The wilderness had patted him on the
head, and, behold, it was like a ball -- an ivory ball; it had caressed him, and -- lo! -- he had withered; it had
taken him, loved him, embraced him, got into his veins, consumed his flesh, and sealed his soul to its own by
the inconceivable ceremonies of some devilish initiation. He was its spoiled and pampered favourite. Ivory? I
should think so. Heaps of it, stacks of it. The old mud shanty was bursting with it. You would think there was
not a single tusk left either above or below the ground in the whole country. 'Mostly fossil,' the manager had
remarked, disparagingly. It was no more fossil than I am; but they call it fossil when it is dug up. It appears
these niggers do bury the tusks sometimes -- but evidently they couldn't bury this parcel deep enough to save
the gifted Mr. Kurtz from his fate. We filled the steamboat with it, and had to pile a lot on the deck. Thus he
could see and enjoy as long as he could see, because the appreciation of this favour had remained with him to
the last. You should have heard him say, 'My ivory.' Oh, yes, I heard him. 'My Intended, my ivory, my
station, my river, my -- ' everything belonged to him. It made me hold my breath in expectation of hearing
the wilderness burst into a prodigious peal of laughter that would shake the fixed stars in their places.
Everything belonged to him -- but that was a trifle. The thing was to know what he belonged to, how many
powers of darkness claimed him for their own. That was the reflection that made you creepy all over. It was
impossible -- it was not good for one either -- trying to imagine. He had taken a high seat amongst the devils
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of the land -- I mean literally. You can't understand. How could you? -- with solid pavement under your feet,
surrounded by kind neighbours ready to cheer you or to fall on you, stepping delicately between the butcher
and the policeman, in the holy terror of scandal and gallows and lunatic asylums -- how can you imagine
what particular region of the first ages a man's untrammelled feet may take him into by the way of solitude -utter solitude without a policeman -- by the way of silence -- utter silence, where no warning voice of a kind
neighbour can be heard whispering of public opinion? These little things make all the great difference. When
they are gone you must fall back upon your own innate strength, upon your own capacity for faithfulness. Of
course you may be too much of a fool to go wrong -- too dull even to know you are being assaulted by the
powers of darkness.
42) He won't be forgotten. Whatever he was, he was not common. He had the power to charm or frighten
rudimentary souls into an aggravated witch-dance in his honour; he could also fill the small souls of the
pilgrims with bitter misgivings: he had one devoted friend at least, and he had conquered one soul in the
world that was neither rudimentary nor tainted with self-seeking.
LA STAZIONE INTERNA: KURTZ
43) "Through my glasses I saw the slope of a hill interspersed with rare trees and perfectly free from undergrowth. A long decaying building on the summit was half buried in the high grass; the large holes in the
peaked roof gaped black from afar; the jungle and the woods made a background. There was no enclosure or
fence of any kind; but there had been one apparently, for near the house half-a-dozen slim posts remained in
a row, roughly trimmed, and with their upper ends ornamented with round carved balls.
44) He looked like a harlequin. His clothes had been made of some stuff that was brown holland probably,
but it was covered with patches all over, with bright patches, blue, red, and yellow -- patches on the back,
patches on the front, patches on elbows, on knees; coloured binding around his jacket, scarlet edging at the
bottom of his trousers; and the sun-shine made him look extremely gay and wonderfully neat withal, because
you could see how beautifully all this patching had been done. A beardless, boyish face, very fair, no
features to speak of, nose peeling, little blue eyes, smiles and frowns chasing each other over that open
countenance like sunshine and shadow on a wind-swept plain.
45) I suppose Kurtz wanted an audience, because on a certain occasion, when encamped in the forest, they
had talked all night, or more probably Kurtz had talked. 'We talked of everything,' he said, quite transported
at the recollection. 'I forgot there was such a thing as sleep. The night did not seem to last an hour.
Everything! Everything! . . . Of love, too.' 'Ah, he talked to you of love!' I said, much amused. 'It isn't what
you think,' he cried, almost passionately. 'It was in general. He made me see things -- things.'
46) This man suffered too much. He hated all this, and somehow he couldn't get away. When I had a chance
I begged him to try and leave while there was time; I offered to go back with him. And he would say yes, and
then he would remain; go off on another ivory hunt; disappear for weeks; forget himself amongst these
people -- forget himself -- you know.
47) I directed my glass to the house. There were no signs of life, but there was the ruined roof, the long mud
wall peeping above the grass, with three little square window-holes, no two of the same size; all this brought
within reach of my hand, as it were. And then I made a brusque movement, and one of the remaining posts of
that vanished fence leaped up in the field of my glass. You remember I told you I had been struck at the
distance by certain attempts at ornamentation, rather remarkable in the ruinous aspect of the place. Now I
had suddenly a nearer view, and its first result was to make me throw my head back as if before a blow. Then
I went carefully from post to post with my glass, and I saw my mistake. These round knobs were not
ornamental but symbolic; they were expressive and puzzling, striking and disturbing -- food for thought and
also for vultures if there had been any looking down from the sky; but at all events for such ants as were
industrious enough to ascend the pole. They would have been even more impressive, those heads on the
stakes, if their faces had not been turned to the house. Only one, the first I had made out, was facing my way.
I was not so shocked as you may think. The start back I had given was really nothing but a movement of
surprise. I had expected to see a knob of wood there, you know. I returned deliberately to the first I had seen
-- and there it was, black, dried, sunken, with closed eyelids -- a head that seemed to sleep at the top of that
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pole, and, with the shrunken dry lips showing a narrow white line of the teeth, was smiling, too, smiling
continuously at some endless and jocose dream of that eternal slumber.
"I am not disclosing any trade secrets. In fact, the manager said afterwards that Mr. Kurtz's methods had
ruined the district. I have no opinion on that point, but I want you clearly to understand that there was
nothing exactly profitable in these heads being there. They only showed that Mr. Kurtz lacked restraint in the
gratification of his various lusts, that there was something wanting in him -- some small matter which, when
the pressing need arose, could not be found under his magnificent eloquence. Whether he knew of this
deficiency himself I can't say. I think the knowledge came to him at last -- only at the very last. But the
wilderness had found him out early, and had taken on him a terrible vengeance for the fantastic invasion. I
think it had whispered to him things about himself which he did not know, things of which he had no
conception till he took counsel with this great solitude -- and the whisper had proved irresistibly fascinating.
It echoed loudly within him because he was hollow at the core. . . . I put down the glass, and the head that
had appeared near enough to be spoken to seemed at once to have leaped away from me into inaccessible
distance.
48) I could not hear a sound, but through my glasses I saw the thin arm extended commandingly, the lower
jaw moving, the eyes of that apparition shining darkly far in its bony head that nodded with grotesque jerks.
Kurtz -- Kurtz -- that means short in German -- don't it? Well, the name was as true as everything else in his
life -- and death. He looked at least seven feet long. His covering had fallen off, and his body emerged from
it pitiful and appalling as from a winding-sheet. I could see the cage of his ribs all astir, the bones of his arm
waving. It was as though an animated image of death carved out of old ivory had been shaking its hand with
menaces at a motionless crowd of men made of dark and glittering bronze. I saw him open his mouth wide -it gave him a weirdly voracious aspect, as though he had wanted to swallow all the air, all the earth, all the
men before him. A deep voice reached me faintly. He must have been shouting. He fell back suddenly. The
stretcher shook as the bearers staggered forward again, and almost at the same time I noticed that the crowd
of savages was vanishing without any perceptible movement of retreat, as if the forest that had ejected these
beings so suddenly had drawn them in again as the breath is drawn in a long aspiration.
49) We had brought his belated correspondence, and a lot of torn envelopes and open letters littered his bed.
His hand roamed feebly amongst these papers. I was struck by the fire of his eyes and the composed languor
of his expression. It was not so much the exhaustion of disease. He did not seem in pain. This shadow looked
satiated and calm, as though for the moment it had had its fill of all the emotions.
"He rustled one of the letters, and looking straight in my face said, 'I am glad.' Somebody had been writing
to him about me. These special recommendations were turning up again. The volume of tone he emitted
without effort, almost without the trouble of moving his lips, amazed me. A voice! a voice! It was grave,
profound, vibrating, while the man did not seem capable of a whisper. However, he had enough strength in
him -- factitious no doubt -- to very nearly make an end of us, as you shall hear directly.
50) "She walked with measured steps, draped in striped and fringed cloths, treading the earth proudly, with a
slight jingle and flash of barbarous ornaments. She carried her head high; her hair was done in the shape of a
helmet; she had brass leggings to the knee, brass wire gauntlets to the elbow, a crimson spot on her tawny
cheek, innumerable necklaces of glass beads on her neck; bizarre things, charms, gifts of witch-men, that
hung about her, glittered and trembled at every step. She must have had the value of several elephant tusks
upon her. She was savage and superb, wild-eyed and magnificent; there was something ominous and stately
in her deliberate progress. And in the hush that had fallen suddenly upon the whole sorrowful land, the
immense wilderness, the colossal body of the fecund and mysterious life seemed to look at her, pensive, as
though it had been looking at the image of its own tenebrous and passionate soul.
"She came abreast of the steamer, stood still, and faced us. Her long shadow fell to the water's edge. Her
face had a tragic and fierce aspect of wild sorrow and of dumb pain mingled with the fear of some struggling,
half-shaped resolve. She stood looking at us without a stir, and like the wilderness itself, with an air of
brooding over an inscrutable purpose. A whole minute passed, and then she made a step forward. There was
a low jingle, a glint of yellow metal, a sway of fringed draperies, and she stopped as if her heart had failed
her. The young fellow by my side growled. The pilgrims murmured at my back. She looked at us all as if her
life had depended upon the unswerving steadiness of her glance. Suddenly she opened her bared arms and
threw them up rigid above her head, as though in an uncontrollable desire to touch the sky, and at the same
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time the swift shadows darted out on the earth, swept around on the river, gathering the steamer into a
shadowy embrace. A formidable silence hung over the scene.
51) "At this moment I heard Kurtz's deep voice behind the curtain: 'Save me! -- save the ivory, you mean.
Don't tell me. Save ME! Why, I've had to save you. You are interrupting my plans now. Sick! Sick! Not so
sick as you would like to believe. Never mind. I'll carry my ideas out yet -- I will return. I'll show you what
can be done. You with your little peddling notions -- you are interfering with me. I will return. I. . . .'
52) "'I had immense plans,' he muttered irresolutely. 'Yes,' said I; 'but if you try to shout I'll smash your head
with -- ' There was not a stick or a stone near. 'I will throttle you for good,' I corrected myself. 'I was on the
threshold of great things,' he pleaded, in a voice of longing, with a wistfulness of tone that made my blood
run cold. 'And now for this stupid scoundrel -- ' 'Your success in Europe is assured in any case,' I affirmed
steadily. I did not want to have the throttling of him, you understand -- and indeed it would have been very
little use for any practical purpose. I tried to break the spell -- the heavy, mute spell of the wilderness – that
seemed to draw him to its pitiless breast by the awakening of forgotten and brutal instincts, by the memory
of gratified and monstrous passions. This alone, I was convinced, had driven him out to the edge of the
forest, to the bush, towards the gleam of fires, the throb of drums, the drone of weird incantations; this alone
had beguiled his unlawful soul beyond the bounds of permitted aspirations. And, don't you see, the terror of
the position was not in being knocked on the head -- though I had a very lively sense of that danger, too -but in this, that I had to deal with a being to whom I could not appeal in the name of anything high or low. I
had, even like the niggers, to invoke him -- himself -- his own exalted and incredible degradation. There was
nothing either above or below him, and I knew it. He had kicked himself loose of the earth. Confound the
man! he had kicked the very earth to pieces.
53) If anybody ever struggled with a soul, I am the man. And I wasn't arguing with a lunatic either. Believe
me or not, his intelligence was perfectly clear -- concentrated, it is true, upon himself with horrible intensity,
yet clear; and therein was my only chance -- barring, of course, the killing him there and then, which wasn't
so good, on account of unavoidable noise. But his soul was mad. Being alone in the wilderness, it had looked
within itself, and, by heavens! I tell you, it had gone mad. I had -- for my sins, I suppose -- to go through the
ordeal of looking into it myself. No eloquence could have been so withering to one's belief in mankind as his
final burst of sincerity. He struggled with himself, too. I saw it -- I heard it. I saw the inconceivable mystery
of a soul that knew no restraint, no faith, and no fear, yet struggling blindly with itself.
54) They broke and ran, they leaped, they crouched, they swerved, they dodged the flying terror of the
sound. The three red chaps had fallen flat, face down on the shore, as though they had been shot dead. Only
the barbarous and superb woman did not so much as flinch, and stretched tragically her bare arms after us
over the sombre and glittering river.
55) "The brown current ran swiftly out of the heart of darkness bearing us down towards the sea with twice
the speed of our upward progress; and Kurtz's life was running swiftly, too, ebbing, ebbing out of his heart
into the sea of inexorable time.
56) "Kurtz discoursed. A voice! a voice! It rang deep to the very last. It survived his strength to hide in the
magnificent folds of eloquence the barren darkness of his heart. Oh, he struggled! he struggled! The wastes
of his weary brain were haunted by shadowy images now -- images of wealth and fame revolving
obsequiously round his unextinguishable gift of noble and lofty expression. My Intended, my station, my
career, my ideas -- these were the subjects for the occasional utterances of elevated sentiments. The shade of
the original Kurtz frequented the bedside of the hollow sham, whose fate it was to be buried presently in the
mould of primeval earth. But both the diabolic love and the unearthly hate of the mysteries it had penetrated
fought for the possession of that soul satiated with primitive emotions, avid of lying fame, of sham
distinction, of all the appearances of success and power.
57) I was fascinated. It was as though a veil had been rent. I saw on that ivory face the expression of sombre
pride, of ruthless power, of craven terror -- of an intense and hopeless despair. Did he live his life again in
every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during that supreme moment of complete knowledge? He
cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision -- he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath:
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"'The horror! The horror!'
58) "However, as you see, I did not go to join Kurtz there and then. I did not. I remained to dream the
nightmare out to the end, and to show my loyalty to Kurtz once more. Destiny. My destiny! Droll thing life is
-- that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some
knowledge of yourself -- that comes too late -- a crop of unextinguishable regrets. I have wrestled with death.
It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine. It takes place in an impalpable greyness, with nothing
underfoot, with nothing around, without spectators, without clamour, without glory, without the great desire
of victory, without the great fear of defeat, in a sickly atmosphere of tepid scepticism, without much belief in
your own right, and still less in that of your adversary. If such is the form of ultimate wisdom, then life is a
greater riddle than some of us think it to be. I was within a hair's breadth of the last opportunity for
pronouncement, and I found with humiliation that probably I would have nothing to say. This is the reason
why I affirm that Kurtz was a remarkable man. He had something to say. He said it. Since I had peeped over
the edge myself, I understand better the meaning of his stare, that could not see the flame of the candle, but
was wide enough to embrace the whole universe, piercing enough to penetrate all the hearts that beat in the
darkness. He had summed up -- he had judged. 'The horror!' He was a remarkable man. After all, this was the
expression of some sort of belief; it had candour, it had conviction, it had a vibrating note of revolt in its
whisper, it had the appalling face of a glimpsed truth -- the strange commingling of desire and hate. And it is
not my own extremity I remember best -- a vision of greyness without form filled with physical pain, and a
careless contempt for the evanescence of all things -- even of this pain itself. No! It is his extremity that I
seem to have lived through. True, he had made that last stride, he had stepped over the edge, while I had
been permitted to draw back my hesitating foot. And perhaps in this is the whole difference; perhaps all the
wisdom, and all truth, and all sincerity, are just compressed into that inappreciable moment of time in which
we step over the threshold of the invisible. Perhaps! I like to think my summing-up would not have been a
word of careless contempt. Better his cry -- much better. It was an affirmation, a moral victory paid for by
innumerable defeats, by abominable terrors, by abominable satisfactions. But it was a victory! That is why I
have remained loyal to Kurtz to the last, and even beyond, when a long time after I heard once more, not his
own voice, but the echo of his magnificent eloquence thrown to me from a soul as translucently pure as a
cliff of crystal.
NELLA CITTÀ SEPOLCRALE
59) I concluded I would go and give her back her portrait and those letters myself. Curiosity? Yes; and also
some other feeling perhaps. All that had been Kurtz's had passed out of my hands: his soul, his body, his
station, his plans, his ivory, his career. There remained only his memory and his Intended -- and I wanted to
give that up, too, to the past, in a way -- to surrender personally all that remained of him with me to that
oblivion which is the last word of our common fate. I don't defend myself. I had no clear perception of what
it was I really wanted. Perhaps it was an impulse of unconscious loyalty, or the fulfilment of one of those
ironic necessities that lurk in the facts of human existence. I don't know. I can't tell. But I went.
"I thought his memory was like the other memories of the dead that accumulate in every man's life -- a
vague impress on the brain of shadows that had fallen on it in their swift and final passage; but before the
high and ponderous door, between the tall houses of a street as still and decorous as a well-kept alley in a
cemetery, I had a vision of him on the stretcher, opening his mouth voraciously, as if to devour all the earth
with all its mankind. He lived then before me; he lived as much as he had ever lived -- a shadow insatiable of
splendid appearances, of frightful realities; a shadow darker than the shadow of the night, and draped nobly
in the folds of a gorgeous eloquence. The vision seemed to enter the house with me -- the stretcher, the
phantom-bearers, the wild crowd of obedient worshippers, the gloom of the forests, the glitter of the reach
between the murky bends, the beat of the drum, regular and muffled like the beating of a heart -- the heart of
a conquering darkness. It was a moment of triumph for the wilderness, an invading and vengeful rush which,
it seemed to me, I would have to keep back alone for the salvation of another soul. And the memory of what
I had heard him say afar there, with the horned shapes stirring at my back, in the glow of fires, within the
patient woods, those broken phrases came back to me, were heard again in their ominous and terrifying
simplicity. I remembered his abject pleading, his abject threats, the colossal scale of his vile desires, the
meanness, the torment, the tempestuous anguish of his soul. And later on I seemed to see his collected
languid manner, when he said one day, 'This lot of ivory now is really mine. The Company did not pay for it.
I collected it myself at a very great personal risk. I am afraid they will try to claim it as theirs though. H'm. It
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is a difficult case. What do you think I ought to do -- resist? Eh? I want no more than justice.'. . . He wanted
no more than justice -- no more than justice. I rang the bell before a mahogany door on the first floor, and
while I waited he seemed to stare at me out of the glassy panel -- stare with that wide and immense stare
embracing, condemning, loathing all the universe. I seemed to hear the whispered cry, "The horror! The
horror!"
60) "'Yes, I know,' I said with something like despair in my heart, but bowing my head before the faith that
was in her, before that great and saving illusion that shone with an unearthly glow in the darkness, in the
triumphant darkness from which I could not have defended her -- from which I could not even defend
myself.
61) "She put out her arms as if after a retreating figure, stretching them back and with clasped pale hands
across the fading and narrow sheen of the window. Never see him! I saw him clearly enough then. I shall see
this eloquent phantom as long as I live, and I shall see her, too, a tragic and familiar Shade, resembling in
this gesture another one, tragic also, and bedecked with powerless charms, stretching bare brown arms over
the glitter of the infernal stream, the stream of darkness. She said suddenly very low, 'He died as he lived.'
62) "'The last word he pronounced was -- your name.'
"I heard a light sigh and then my heart stood still, stopped dead short by an exulting and terrible cry, by the
cry of inconceivable triumph and of unspeakable pain. 'I knew it -- I was sure!' . . . She knew. She was sure. I
heard her weeping; she had hidden her face in her hands. It seemed to me that the house would collapse
before I could escape, that the heavens would fall upon my head. But nothing happened. The heavens do not
fall for such a trifle. Would they have fallen, I wonder, if I had rendered Kurtz that justice which was his
due? Hadn't he said he wanted only justice? But I couldn't. I could not tell her. It would have been too dark -too dark altogether. . . ."
Marlow ceased, and sat apart, indistinct and silent, in the pose of a meditating Buddha. Nobody moved for
a time. "We have lost the first of the ebb," said the Director suddenly. I raised my head. The offing was
barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed
sombre under an overcast sky -- seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness.
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JOSEPH CONRAD: The Duel (1908)
Preface:
It remains for me only now to mention The Duel, the longest story in the book. That story attained
the dignity of publication all by itself in a small illustrated volume, under the title, “The Point of
Honour.” That was many years ago. It has been since reinstated in its proper place, which is the
place it occupies in this volume, in all the subsequent editions of my work. Its pedigree is extremely
simple. It springs from a ten-line paragraph in a small provincial paper published in the South of
France. That paragraph, occasioned by a duel with a fatal ending between two well-known Parisian
personalities, referred for some reason or other to the “well-known fact” of two officers in
Napoleon’s Grand Army having fought a series of duels in the midst of great wars and on some
futile pretext. The pretext was never disclosed. I had therefore to invent it; and I think that, given
the character of the two officers which I had to invent, too, I have made it sufficiently convincing by
the mere force of its absurdity. The truth is that in my mind the story is nothing but a serious and
even earnest attempt at a bit of historical fiction. I had heard in my boyhood a good deal of the
great Napoleonic legend. I had a genuine feeling that I would find myself at home in it, and The
Duel is the result of that feeling, or, if the reader prefers, of that presumption. Personally I have no
qualms of conscience about this piece of work. The story might have been better told of course. All
one’s work might have been better done; but this is the sort of reflection a worker must put aside
courageously if he doesn’t mean every one of his conceptions to remain for ever a private vision, an
evanescent reverie. How many of those visions have I seen vanish in my time! This one, however,
has remained, a testimony, if you like, to my courage or a proof of my rashness. What I care to
remember best is the testimony of some French readers who volunteered the opinion that in those
hundred pages or so I had managed to render “wonderfully” the spirit of the whole epoch.
Exaggeration of kindness no doubt; but even so I hug it still to my breast, because in truth that is
exactly what I was trying to capture in my small net: the Spirit of the Epoch — never purely
militarist in the long clash of arms, youthful, almost childlike in its exaltation of sentiment —
naively heroic in its faith.
INCIPIT
1) NAPOLEON I., whose career had the quality of a duel against the whole of Europe, disliked duelling
between the officers of his army. The great military emperor was not a swashbuckler, and had little respect
for tradition.
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Nevertheless, a story of duelling, which became a legend in the army, runs through the epic of imperial wars.
To the surprise and admiration of their fellows, two officers, like insane artists trying to gild refined gold or
paint the lily, pursued a private contest through the years of universal carnage. They were officers of
cavalry, and their connection with the high-spirited but fanciful animal which carries men into battle seems
particularly appropriate. It would be difficult to imagine for heroes of this legend two officers of infantry of
the line, for example, whose fantasy is tamed by much walking exercise, and whose valour necessarily must
be of a more plodding kind. As to gunners or engineers, whose heads are kept cool on a diet of mathematics,
it is simply unthinkable.
The names of the two officers were Feraud and D’Hubert, and they were both lieutenants in a regiment of
hussars, but not in the same regiment.
1) IL DUELLO:
a. IL PRIMO DUELLO DI FERAUD
Feraud took a view of his duel in which neither remorse nor yet a rational apprehension of
consequences had any place. Though he had no clear recollection how the quarrel had originated
(it was begun in an establishment where beer and wine are drunk late at night), he had not the
slightest doubt of being himself the outraged party. He had had two experienced friends for his
seconds. Everything had been done according to the rules governing that sort of adventures. And a
duel is obviously fought for the purpose of someone being at least hurt, if not killed outright. The
civilian got hurt. That also was in order. Lieut. Feraud was perfectly tranquil; but Lieut. D’Hubert
took it for affectation, and spoke with a certain vivacity.
b. L’ORIGINE DEL DUELLO FRA D’HUBERT E FERAUD
Do you imagine I am a man to submit tamely to injustice?” he inquired, in a boisterous voice.
“Oh, do be reasonable!” remonstrated Lieut. D’Hubert.
“I am reasonable! I am perfectly reasonable!” retorted the other with ominous restraint. “I can’t call the
general to account for his behaviour, but you are going to answer me for yours.”
“I can’t listen to this nonsense,” murmured Lieut. D’Hubert, making a slightly contemptuous grimace.
“You call this nonsense? It seems to me a perfectly plain statement. Unless you don’t understand French.”
“What on earth do you mean?”
“I mean,” screamed suddenly Lieut. Feraud, “to cut off your ears to teach you to disturb me with the
general’s orders when I am talking to a lady!”
c. DUELLO INFINITO
This appearance was caused on the part of Captain D’Hubert by a rational desire to be done once for all with
this worry; on the part of Captain Feraud by a tremendous exaltation of his pugnacious instincts and the
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incitement of wounded vanity. At last, dishevelled, their shirts in rags, covered with gore and hardly able to
stand, they were led away forcibly by their marvelling and horrified seconds. Later on, besieged by comrades
avid of details, these gentlemen declared that they could not have allowed that sort of hacking to go on
indefinitely. Asked whether the quarrel was settled this time, they gave it out as their conviction that it was a
difference which could only be settled by one of the parties remaining lifeless on the ground.
d. He [D’Hubert] didn’t care a snap for what that lunatic could do. He had suddenly acquired the conviction
that his adversary was utterly powerless to affect his life in any sort of way; except, perhaps, in the way of
putting a special excitement into the delightful, gay intervals between the campaigns.
d. L’ULTIMO DUELLO
The revulsion of feeling was accompanied by a gust of homicidal fury, resuming in its violence the
accumulated resentment of a lifetime. For years General D ‘Hubert had been exasperated and humiliated by
an atrocious absurdity imposed upon him by this man’s savage caprice. Besides, General D’Hubert had been
in this last instance too unwilling to confront death for the reaction of his anguish not to take the shape of a
desire to kill. “And I have my two shots to fire yet,” he added, pitilessly.
General Feraud snapped-to his teeth, and his face assumed an irate, undaunted expression. “Go on!” he said,
grimly.
These would have been his last words if General D’Hubert had been holding the pistols in his hands. But the
pistols were lying on the ground at the foot of a pine. General D’Hubert had the second of leisure necessary
to remember that he had dreaded death not as a man, but as a lover; not as a danger, but as a rival; not as a
foe to life, but as an obstacle to marriage. And behold! there was the rival defeated! — utterly defeated,
crushed, done for!
He picked up the weapons mechanically, and, instead of firing them into General Feraud’s breast, he gave
expression to the thoughts uppermost in his mind, “You will fight no more duels now.”
His tone of leisurely, ineffable satisfaction was too much for General Feraud’s stoicism. “Don’t dawdle,
then, damn you for a cold-blooded staff-coxcomb!” he roared out, suddenly, out of an impassive face held
erect on a rigidly still body.
General D’Hubert uncocked the pistols carefully. This proceeding was observed with mixed feelings by the
other general. “You missed me twice,” the victor said, coolly, shifting both pistols to one hand; “the last time
within a foot or so. By every rule of single combat your life belongs to me. That does not mean that I want to
take it now.”
[…]
General Feraud looked startled, and the other continued, “You’ve forced me on a point of honour to keep my
life at your disposal, as it were, for fifteen years. Very well. Now that the matter is decided to my advantage,
I am going to do what I like with your life on the same principle. You shall keep it at my disposal as long as I
choose. Neither more nor less. You are on your honour till I say the word.”
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e. DOPO LA FINE DEL DUELLO
Now that his life was safe it had suddenly lost its special magnificence. It had acquired instead a specially
alarming aspect as a snare for the exposure of unworthiness. As to the marvellous illusion of conquered love
that had visited him for a moment in the agitated watches of the night, which might have been his last on
earth, he comprehended now its true nature. It had been merely a paroxysm of delirious conceit. Thus to this
man, sobered by the victorious issue of a duel, life appeared robbed of its charm, simply because it was no
longer menaced.
2) CONGETTURE SULLE RAGIONI DEL DUELLO
a. L’ORIGINE DELLA LORO CELEBRITÀ
The two young officers, of no especial consequence till then, became distinguished by the universal curiosity
as to the origin of their quarrel. Madame de Lionne’s salon was the centre of ingenious surmises; […] A
personage with a long, pale face, resembling the countenance of a sheep, opined, shaking his head, that it
was a quarrel of long standing envenomed by time. It was objected to him that the men themselves were too
young for such a theory. They belonged also to different and distant parts of France. There were other
physical impossibilities, too. A sub-commissary of the Intendence, an agreeable and cultivated bachelor in
kerseymere breeches, Hessian boots, and a blue coat embroidered with silver lace, who affected to believe in
the transmigration of souls, suggested that the two had met perhaps in some previous existence. The feud
was in the forgotten past. It might have been something quite inconceivable in the present state of their
being; but their souls remembered the animosity, and manifested an instinctive antagonism. He developed
this theme jocularly. Yet the affair was so absurd from the worldly, the military, the honourable, or the
prudential point of view, that this weird explanation seemed rather more reasonable than any other.
b. ALTRE CONGETTURE
The merits of the two officers as combatants were frankly discussed; but their attitude to each other after the
duel was criticised lightly and with caution. It was irreconcilable, and that was to be regretted. But after all
they knew best what the care of their honour dictated. It was not a matter for their comrades to pry into overmuch. As to the origin of the quarrel, the general impression was that it dated from the time they were
holding garrison in Strasbourg. The musical surgeon shook his head at that. It went much farther back, he
thought.
c. LA LEGGENDA
But indeed an officer need have been very young in his profession not to have heard the legendary tale of
that duel originating in a mysterious, unforgivable offence.
e. IL DUELLO PRENDE UN ASPETTO FANTASMATICO: L’OMBRA
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Only four-and-twenty months ago the masters of Europe, they [the seconds] had already the air of antique
ghosts, they seemed less substantial in their faded coats than their own narrow shadows falling so black
across the white road: the military and grotesque shadows of twenty years of war and conquests. They had
an outlandish appearance of two imperturbable bonzes of the religion of the sword. And General D’Hubert,
also one of the ex-masters of Europe, laughed at these serious phantoms standing in his way.
3) D’HUBERT
a. «dandified staff officer»
b. The compelling power of authority, the persuasive influence of kindness, affected powerfully a man just
risen from a bed of sickness. Lieut. D’Hubert’s hand, which grasped the knob of a stick, trembled slightly.
But his northern temperament, sentimental yet cautious and clear-sighted, too, in its idealistic way, checked
his impulse to make a clean breast of the whole deadly absurdity. According to the precept of transcendental
wisdom, he turned his tongue seven times in his mouth before he spoke. He made then only a speech of
thanks.
c. The reputation of Lieut. D’Hubert for good sense and good temper weighed in the balance. A
cool head, a warm heart, open as the day. Always correct in his behaviour. One had to trust him.
d. delicacy of his feelings […] elegant person […] he was reflective
e. DIVENTA IL BERSAGLIO DELL’ODIO BONAPARTISTA
Military to the very bottom of his soul, the prospect of rising in his profession consoled him from finding
himself the butt of Bonapartist malevolence, which pursued him with a persistence he could not account for.
All the rancour of that embittered and persecuted party pointed to him as the man who had never loved the
Emperor — a sort of monster essentially worse than a mere betrayer.
f. Secondo Feraud è un «intriguing dandy»
g. ORGOGLIO
General D’Hubert was proud and reserved. He had not been damaged by his casual love affairs, successful
or otherwise. In his war-scarred body his heart at forty remained unscratched. Entering with reserve into his
sister’s matrimonial plans, he had felt himself falling irremediably in love as one falls off a roof. He was too
proud to be frightened.
[…]
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His pride (and pride aims always at true success) would be satisfied with nothing short of love. But as true
pride excludes vanity, he could not imagine any reason why this mysterious creature with deep and brilliant
eyes of a violet colour should have any feeling for him warmer than indifference.
4) FERAUD
a. «savagely dumb»
b. This fighter by vocation resolved in his mind to seize showy occasions and to court the favourable opinion
of his chiefs like a mere worldling. He knew he was as brave as any one, and never doubted his personal
charm. Nevertheless, neither the bravery nor the charm seemed to work very swiftly. Lieut. Feraud’s
engaging, careless truculence of a beau sabreur underwent a change. He began to make bitter allusions to
“clever fellows who stick at nothing to get on.” The army was full of them, he would say; you had only to
look round. But all the time he had in view one person only, his adversary, D’Hubert. Once he confided to an
appreciative friend: “You see, I don’t know how to fawn on the right sort of people. It isn’t in my character.”
c. «brute»
d. But the strain of unhappiness caused by military reverses had spoiled Colonel Feraud’s character. Like
many other men, he was rendered wicked by misfortune.
e. dopo la disfatta napoleonica gli viene tolto il comando:
He remained irreconcilable, idle, and sinister. He sought in obscure restaurants the company of other halfpay officers who cherished dingy but glorious old tricolour cockades in their breast-pockets, and buttoned
with the forbidden eagle buttons their shabby uniforms, declaring themselves too poor to afford the expense
of the prescribed change.
f. dopo esser stato salvato da D’Hubert
General Feraud, totally unable (as is the case with most of us) to comprehend what was happening to him,
received the Minister of War’s order to proceed at once to a small town of Central France with feelings
whose natural expression consisted in a fierce rolling of the eye and savage grinding of the teeth. The
passing away of the state of war, the only condition of society he had ever known, the horrible view of a
world at peace, frightened him. He went away to his little town firmly convinced that this could not last.
There he was informed of his retirement from the army, and that his pension (calculated on the scale of a
colonel’s rank) was made dependent on the correctness of his conduct, and on the good reports of the police.
No longer in the army! He felt suddenly strange to the earth, like a disembodied spirit. It was impossible to
exist. But at first he reacted from sheer incredulity. This could not be. He waited for thunder, earthquakes,
natural cataclysms; but nothing happened. The leaden weight of an irremediable idleness descended upon
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General Feraud, who having no resources within himself sank into a state of awe-inspiring hebetude. He
haunted the streets of the little town, gazing before him with lacklustre eyes, disregarding the hats raised on
his passage; and people, nudging each other as he went by, whispered, “That’s poor General Feraud. His
heart is broken. Behold how he loved the Emperor.”
The other living wreckage of Napoleonic tempest clustered round General Feraud with infinite respect. He,
himself, imagined his soul to be crushed by grief. He suffered from quickly succeeding impulses to weep, to
howl, to bite his fists till blood came, to spend days on his bed with his head thrust under the pillow; but
these arose from sheer ennui, from the anguish of an immense, indescribable, inconceivable boredom. His
mental inability to grasp the hopeless nature of his case as a whole saved him from suicide. He never even
thought of it once. He thought of nothing. But his appetite abandoned him, and the difficulty he experienced
to express the overwhelming nature of his feelings (the most furious swearing could do no justice to it)
induced gradually a habit of silence — a sort of death to a southern temperament.
Great, therefore, was the sensation amongst the anciens militaires frequenting a certain little cafe; full of flies
when one stuffy afternoon “that poor General Feraud” let out suddenly a volley of formidable curses.
g. dopo la decisione dell’ultima sfida:
In this strain General Feraud ran on, holding up his head, with owlish eyes and rapacious beak. A mere
fighter all his life, a cavalry man, a sabreur, he conceived war with the utmost simplicity, as, in the main, a
massed lot of personal contests, a sort of gregarious duelling. And here he had in hand a war of his own.
h. D’Hubert lo considera un «imbecile brute» e si rimprovera per averlo salvato (ritiene di essere stato «A
sensitive idiot. Because I overheard two men talking in a cafe… I am an idiot afraid of lie – whereas in liea it
isonly truth that matters»)
5) D’HUBERT / FERAUD – IO/ALTRO
a. In the afternoon Lieut. D’Hubert, very popular as a good comrade uniting great bravery with a frank and
equable temper, had many visitors. It was remarked that Lieut. Feraud did not, as is customary, show
himself much abroad to receive the felicitations of his friends. They would not have failed him, because he,
too, was liked for the exuberance of his southern nature and the simplicity of his character.
b. The first signs of a not unbecoming baldness added to the lofty aspect of Colonel D’Hubert’s forehead.
This feature was no longer white and smooth as in the days of his youth; the kindly open glance of his blue
eyes had grown a little hard as if from much peering through the smoke of battles. The ebony crop on
Colonel Feraud’s head, coarse and crinkly like a cap of horsehair, showed many silver threads about the
temples. A detestable warfare of ambushes and inglorious surprises had not improved his temper. The beaklike curve of his nose was unpleasantly set off by a deep fold on each side of his mouth. The round orbits of
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his eyes radiated wrinkles. More than ever he recalled an irritable and staring bird — something like a cross
between a parrot and an owl. He was still extremely outspoken in his dislike of “intriguing fellows.”
c.This is the faithful record of speeches exchanged during the retreat from Moscow by Colonels Feraud and
D’Hubert. Colonel Feraud’s taciturnity was the outcome of concentrated rage. Short, hairy, black faced,
with layers of grime and the thick sprouting of a wiry beard, a frost-bitten hand wrapped up in filthy rags
carried in a sling, he accused fate of unparalleled perfidy towards the sublime Man of Destiny. Colonel
D’Hubert, his long moustaches pendent in icicles on each side of his cracked blue lips, his eyelids inflamed
with the glare of snows, the principal part of his costume consisting of a sheepskin coat looted with difficulty
from the frozen corpse of a camp follower found in an abandoned cart, took a more thoughtful view of
events. His regularly handsome features, now reduced to mere bony lines and fleshless hollows, looked out
of a woman’s black velvet hood, over which was rammed forcibly a cocked hat picked up under the wheels
of an empty army fourgon, which must have contained at one time some general officer’s luggage. The
sheepskin coat being short for a man of his inches ended very high up, and the skin of his legs, blue with the
cold, showed through the tatters of his nether garments. This under the circumstances provoked neither jeers
nor pity. No one cared how the next man felt or looked. Colonel D’Hubert himself, hardened to exposure,
suffered mainly in his self-respect from the lamentable indecency of his costume.
d. LETTERE
Thus wrote Colonel D ‘Hubert from Pomerania to his married sister Leonie, settled in the south of France.
And so far the sentiments expressed would not have been disowned by Colonel Feraud, who wrote no letters
to anybody, whose father had been in life an illiterate blacksmith, who had no sister or brother, and whom
no one desired ardently to pair off for a life of peace with a charming young girl. But Colonel D ‘Hubert’s
letter contained also some philosophical generalities upon the uncertainty of all personal hopes, when bound
up entirely with the prestigious fortune of one incomparably great it is true, yet still remaining but a man in
his greatness. This view would have appeared rank heresy to Colonel Feraud. Some melancholy forebodings
of a military kind, expressed cautiously, would have been pronounced as nothing short of high treason by
Colonel Feraud.
e. AUTOCONTROLLO / PASSIONE
He [Feraud] concealed them [misgivings] under a cheerful courtesy of such pleasant character that people
were inclined to ask themselves with wonder whether Colonel D’Hubert was aware of any disasters. Not only
his manners, but even his glances remained untroubled. The steady amenity of his blue eyes disconcerted all
grumblers, and made despair itself pause.
This bearing was remarked favourably by the Emperor himself; for Colonel D’Hubert, attached now to the
Major-General’s staff, came on several occasions under the imperial eye. But it exasperated the higher
strung nature of Colonel Feraud. Passing through Magdeburg on service, this last allowed himself, while
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seated gloomily at dinner with the Commandant de Place, to say of his life-long adversary: “This man does
not love the Emperor,” and his words were received by the other guests in profound silence. Colonel Feraud,
troubled in his conscience at the atrocity of the aspersion, felt the need to back it up by a good argument. “I
ought to know him,” he cried, adding some oaths. “One studies one’s adversary. I have met him on the
ground half a dozen times, as all the army knows. What more do you want? If that isn’t opportunity enough
for any fool to size up his man, may the devil take me if I can tell what is.” And he looked around the table,
obstinate and sombre.
f. LO STRATEGA / IL COMBATTENTE
The problem was how to kill the adversary. Nothing short of that would free him [D’Hubert] from this
imbecile nightmare. “It’s no use wounding that brute,” thought General D’Hubert. He was known as a
resourceful officer. His comrades years ago used also to call him The Strategist. And it was a fact that he
could think in the presence of the enemy. Whereas Feraud had been always a mere fighter — but a dead shot,
unluckily.
“I must draw his fire at the greatest possible range,” said General D’Hubert to himself.
6) D’HUBERT – FERAUD: L’IO e L’ALTRO
a. DURANTE LA RITIRATA DA MOSCA: due eroi
Though often marching in the ranks, or skirmishing in the woods side by side, the two officers ignored each
other; this not so much from inimical intention as from a very real indifference. All their store of moral
energy was expended in resisting the terrific enmity of nature and the crushing sense of irretrievable
disaster. To the last they counted among the most active, the least demoralized of the battalion; their
vigorous vitality invested them both with the appearance of an heroic pair in the eyes of their comrades. And
they never exchanged more than a casual word or two, except one day, when skirmishing in front of the
battalion against a worrying attack of cavalry, they found themselves cut off in the woods by a small party of
Cossacks. A score of fur-capped, hairy horsemen rode to and fro, brandishing their lances in ominous
silence; but the two officers had no mind to lay down their arms, and Colonel Feraud suddenly spoke up in a
hoarse, growling voice, bringing his firelock to the shoulder. “You take the nearest brute, Colonel D’Hubert;
I’ll settle the next one. I am a better shot than you are.”
Colonel D’Hubert nodded over his levelled musket. Their shoulders were pressed against the trunk of a
large tree; on their front enormous snowdrifts protected them from a direct charge. Two carefully aimed
shots rang out in the frosty air, two Cossacks reeled in their saddles. The rest, not thinking the game good
enough, closed round their wounded comrades and galloped away out of range. The two officers managed to
rejoin their battalion halted for the night. During that afternoon they had leaned upon each other more than
once, and towards the end, Colonel D’Hubert, whose long legs gave him an advantage in walking through
soft snow, peremptorily took the musket of Colonel Feraud from him and carried it on his shoulder, using his
own as a staff.
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b. L’insano bisogno di salvare l’ALTRO
Living all his spare moments, as is frequently the case with expectant lovers, a day in advance of reality, and
in a state of bestarred hallucination, it required nothing less than the name of his perpetual antagonist
pronounced in a loud voice to call the youngest of Napoleon’s generals away from the mental contemplation
of his betrothed. He looked round. The strangers wore civilian clothes. Lean and weather-beaten, lolling back
in their chairs, they scowled at people with moody and defiant abstraction from under their hats pulled low
over their eyes. It was not difficult to recognize them for two of the compulsorily retired officers of the Old
Guard. As from bravado or carelessness they chose to speak in loud tones, General D’Hubert, who saw no
reason why he should change his seat, heard every word. They did not seem to be the personal friends of
General Feraud. His name came up amongst others. Hearing it repeated, General D’Hubert’s tender
anticipations of a domestic future adorned with a woman’s grace were traversed by the harsh regret of his
warlike past, of that one long, intoxicating clash of arms, unique in the magnitude of its glory and disaster —
the marvellous work and the special possession of his own generation. He felt an irrational tenderness
towards his old adversary and appreciated emotionally the murderous absurdity their encounter had
introduced into his life. It was like an additional pinch of spice in a hot dish. He remembered the flavour
with sudden melancholy. He would never taste it again. It was all over. “I fancy it was being left lying in the
garden that had exasperated him so against me from the first,” he thought, indulgently.
[…]
General D’Hubert experienced the horror of a somnambulist who wakes up from a complacent dream of
activity to find himself walking on a quagmire. A profound disgust of the ground on which he was making
his way overcame him. Even the image of the charming girl was swept from his view in the flood of moral
distress. Everything he had ever been or hoped to be would taste of bitter ignominy unless he could manage
to save General Feraud from the fate which threatened so many braves. Under the impulse of this almost
morbid need to attend to the safety of his adversary, General D’Hubert worked so well with hands and feet
(as the French saying is), that in less than twenty-four hours he found means of obtaining an extraordinary
private audience from the Minister of Police.
[…]
General D’Hubert stood up feeling as though he had gone through an infectious illness.
c. INTIMATE
Intimate friend?”
“Intimate . . . yes. There is between us an intimate connection of a nature which makes it a point of honour
with me to try . . .”
d. IL VITALIZIO
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We must take care of him, secretly, to the end of his days. Don’t I owe him the most ecstatic moment of my
life? . . . Ha! ha! ha! Over the fields, two miles, running all the way! I couldn’t believe my ears! . . . But for
his stupid ferocity, it would have taken me years to find you out. It’s extraordinary how in one way or
another this man has managed to fasten himself on my deeper feelings.”
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JOSEPH CONRAD: The Secret Sharer (1909)
1) INCIPIT: SENSO DI MISTERO, DI ISOLAMENTO E DI CALMA ASSOLUTA
On my right hand there were lines of fishing stakes resembling a mysterious system of half-submerged
bamboo fences, incomprehensible in its division of the domain of tropical fishes, and crazy of aspect as if
abandoned forever by some nomad tribe of fishermen now gone to the other end of the ocean; for there was
no sign of human habitation as far as the eye could reach. To the left a group of barren islets, suggesting
ruins of stone walls, towers, and blockhouses, had its foundations set in a blue sea that itself looked solid, so
still and stable did it lie below my feet; even the track of light from the westering sun shone smoothly,
without that animated glitter which tells of an imperceptible ripple.
2) ESTRANEITÀ DEL CAPITANO ALLA NAVE:
It must be said, too, that I knew very little of my officers. In consequence of certain events of no particular
significance, except to myself, I had been appointed to the command only a fortnight before. Neither did I
know much of the hands forward. All these people had been together for eighteen months or so, and my
position was that of the only stranger on board. I mention this because it has some bearing on what is to
follow. But what I felt most was my being a stranger to the ship; and if all the truth must be told, I was
somewhat of a stranger to myself. The youngest man on board (barring the second mate), and untried as yet
by a position of the fullest responsibility, I was willing to take the adequacy of the others for granted. They
had simply to be equal to their tasks; but I wondered how far I should turn out faithful to that ideal
conception of one’s own personality every man sets up for himself secretly.
3) SCOPO: SUPERAMENTO DEL SENSO DI ESTRANEITÀ:
Already the ship was drawing ahead. And I was alone with her. Nothing! no one in the world should stand
now between us, throwing a shadow on the way of silent knowledge and mute affection, the perfect
communion of a seaman with his first command.
4) PARADIGMA TERRA/MARE:
And suddenly I rejoiced in the great security of the sea as compared with the unrest of the land, in my choice
of that untempted life presenting no disquieting problems, invested with an elementary moral beauty by the
absolute straightforwardness of its appeal and by the singleness of its purpose.
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5) INFRAZIONI DELLA LEGGE:
a) I felt painfully that I— a stranger — was doing something unusual when I directed him to let all hands
turn in without setting an anchor watch. I proposed to keep on deck myself till one o’clock or thereabouts. I
would get the second mate to relieve me at that hour.
“He will turn out the cook and the steward at four,” I concluded, “and then give you [il primo ufficiale] a
call. Of course at the slightest sign of any sort of wind we’ll have the hands up and make a start at once.”
He concealed his astonishment. “Very well, sir.” Outside the cuddy he put his head in the second mate’s door
to inform him of my unheard-of caprice to take a five hours’ anchor watch on myself. I heard the other raise
his voice incredulously —“What? The Captain himself?” Then a few more murmurs, a door closed, then
another. A few moments later I went on deck.
b) Before I could form a guess a faint flash of phosphorescent light, which seemed to issue suddenly from
the naked body of a man, flickered in the sleeping water with the elusive, silent play of summer lightning in
a night sky. With a gasp I saw revealed to my stare a pair of feet, the long legs, a broad livid back immersed
right up to the neck in a greenish cadaverous glow. One hand, awash, clutched the bottom rung of the ladder.
He was complete but for the head. A headless corpse!
c) «I was almost as much of a stranger as himself, I said»; «Before I left the cabin our eyes met – the eyes of
the only two strangers on board».
d) “Yes. Very wrong indeed. I’ve killed a man.”
“What do you mean? Just now?”
“No, on the passage. Weeks ago. Thirty-nine south. When I say a man —”
“Fit of temper,” I suggested, confidently.
[…]
You know well enough the sort of ill-conditioned snarling cur —”
He appealed to me as if our experiences had been as identical as our clothes. And I knew well enough the
pestiferous danger of such a character where there are no means of legal repression. And I knew well enough
also that my double there was no homicidal ruffian. I did not think of asking him for details, and he told me
the story roughly in brusque, disconnected sentences. I needed no more. I saw it all going on as though I
were myself inside that other sleeping suit.
e) I had become so connected in thoughts and impressions with the secret sharer of my cabin that I felt as if I,
personally, were being given to understand that I, too, was not the sort that would have done for the chief
mate of a ship like the Sephora. I had no doubt of it in my mind.
If he had only known how afraid I was of his putting my feeling of identity with the other to the test!
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f) It was all very simple. The same strung-up force which had given twenty-four men a chance, at least, for
their lives, had, in a sort of recoil, crushed an unworthy mutinous existence.
g) This is not the place to enlarge upon the sensations of a man who feels for the first time a ship move under
his feet to his own independent word. In my case they were not unalloyed. I was not wholly alone with my
command; for there was that stranger in my cabin. Or rather, I was not completely and wholly with her. Part
of me was absent. That mental feeling of being in two places at once affected me physically as if the mood of
secrecy had penetrated my very soul.
h) I had shut my eyes — because the ship must go closer. She must! The stillness was intolerable. Were we
standing still?
[…]
I ignored it. I had to go on.
[…]
I wondered what my double there in the sail locker thought of this commotion. He was able to hear
everything — and perhaps he was able to understand why, on my conscience, it had to be thus close — no
less.
And now I forgot the secret stranger ready to depart, and remembered only that I was a total stranger to the
ship. I did not know her. Would she do it? How was she to be handled?
6) AGGRESSIVITÀ
All hands saw it coming [an awful sea] and took to the rigging, but I had him by the throat, and went on
shaking him like a rat, the men above us yelling, ‘Look out! look out!’ Then a crash as if the sky had fallen
on my head. They say that for over ten minutes hardly anything was to be seen of the ship — just the three
masts and a bit of the forecastle head and of the poop all awash driving along in a smother of foam. It was a
miracle that they found us, jammed together behind the forebitts. It’s clear that I meant business, because I
was holding him by the throat still when they picked us up. He was black in the face.
[…]
I caught his arm as he was raising it to batter his poor devoted head, and shook it violently.
“She’s ashore already,” he wailed, trying to tear himself away.
“Is she? . . . Keep good full there!”
“Good full, sir,” cried the helmsman in a frightened, thin, childlike voice.
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I hadn’t let go the mate’s arm and went on shaking it. “Ready about, do you hear? You go forward”— shake
—“and stop there”— shake —“and hold your noise”— shake —” and see these head-sheets properly
overhauled”— shake, shake — shake.
And all the time I dared not look towards the land lest my heart should fail me. I released my grip at last and
he ran forward as if fleeing for dear life.
7) SALVEZZA FUORI DAL MONDO
Unknown to trade, to travel, almost to geography, the manner of life they [le isole] harbor is an unsolved
secret. There must be villages — settlements of fishermen at least — on the largest of them, and some
communication with the world is probably kept up by native craft. But all that forenoon, as we headed for
them, fanned along by the faintest of breezes, I saw no sign of man or canoe in the field of the telescope I
kept on pointing at the scattered group.
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FORD MADOX FORD, The Good Soldier. A Tale of Passion (1915)
Inreccio:
Part I
1- tema dell’umana ignoranza e primo ritratto di Edward
2- l’incontro con Florence e le zie
3- il 4 agosto 1904: il primo incontro con Edward e Leonora; il secondo ritratto di Edward, e il
primo ritratto di Leonora
4- il viaggio alla città di M- (episodio della mancata rivelazione)
5- il retrosecena: i tradimenti di Edward; lo schiaffo a Maisie
6- l’amicizia fra Florence e Leonora e i dettagli relativi alla morte di Maisie
Part II
1- la superstizione numerologica di Florence e storia del loro matrimonio
2- 4 agosto 1913: morte di Florence
Part III
1- 4 agosto 1913: dopo la morte di Florence. Due rivelazioni: il tradimento di Florence, il suo
suicidio
2- Dopo la morte di Florence a Nauheim: Leonora tiene al guinzaglio Edward. Ritratto di
Nancy
3- Di ritorno da Nauheim: il crollo nervoso di Leonora; la storia di Leonora
4- Tema delle impressioni e storia della Dolciquita
5- Dopo la storia della Dolciquita, la storia di Mrs Basil e di Maisie; l’arrivo di Florence
Part IV
1- Riflessione metanarrativa. Torna indietro all’episodio del viaggio a M-. Accenno al Nancy
che verrà mandata via
2- Il telegramma viene scritto quando lui è in America. Torna a raccontare del crollo nervoso di
Leonora dopo Nauheim
3- Racconto di quel che era successo un mese prima: Nancy si rende conto che Edward non
ama più Leonora
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4- Scenata fra Leonora e Nancy. Il telegramma di Mr White il mattino dopo e annuncio del
futuro arrivo di Dowell sulla scena
5- Trascorrono 18 mesi da quando ha raccontato il capitolo 4. La storia triste. Racconta di
come sia andato a prendere Nancy e della sua follia. Il rifiuto da pare di Edward di Nancy
6- Riflessioni conclusive sulla teoria della sopravvivenza del ‘più normale’. Finale rivelazione
del suicidio di Edward.
Tecniche narrative:
1) time-shif: sta alla base dello scollamento fra fabula e intreccio
2) impiego oscuro della prolessi: il narratore dà l’impressione di monologare o di rivolgersi a un
destinatario già informato:
I, 1, 15:
[…] - I don’t believe that for one minute she was out of my sight, except when she was safely tucked up in
bed and I should be downstairs, talking to some good fellow or other in some lounge or smoking-room or
taking my final turn with a cigar before going to bed. I don’t, you understand, blame Florence. But how can
she have known what she knew? How could she have got to know it? To know it so fully? Heavens! There
doesn’t seem to have the actual time. It must have been when I was taking my baths, and my Swedish
exercises, being manicured. Leading the life I did, of the sedulous, strrained nurse.I had to do something to
keep myself fit. It must have been then! Yet even that can’t have been enough time to get the tremendously
long conversations full of worldly wisdom that Leonora has reported to me since their deaths. And is it
possible to imagine that during our prescribed walks in Nauheim and the neighbourhood she found time to
carry between Edward Ashburnham and his wife? And isn’t it incredible that during all that time Edward and
Leonora never spoke a word to each other in private? What is one to think of humanity?
I, 2, 25-26:
I inherited his money because Florence died five days after him. […]
Yes, it was a great worry. And just as I had got things roughly settled I received the extraordinary
cable from Ashburnham begging me to come back and have a talk with him. And immediately afterwards
came one from Leonora saying, ‘Yes, please do come. You could be so helpful.’ It was as if he had sent the
cable without consulting her and had afterwards told her. Indeed, that was pretty much what had happened,
except that he had told the girl and the girl had told the wife. I arrived, however, too late to be of any good if
I could have been of any good. And then I had my first taste of English life. It was amazing. It was
overwhelming. I never shall forget the polished cob that Edward, beside me, drove; the animal’s action, its
high-stepping, its skin that was like satin. And the peace! And the red cheeks! And the beautiful, beautiful
old house.
Just near Branshaw Teleragh it was and we discended on it from the high, clear, windswept waste of
the new Forest. I tell you it was amazing to arrive there from Waterbury. And it came into my head – for
Teddy Ashburnham, you remember, had cabled to me to ‘come and have a talk’ with him – that it was
unbelievable that anything essentially calamitous could happen to that place and those people. I tell you it
was the very spirit of peace. And Leonora, beautiful and smiling, with her coils of yellow hair, stood on the
top doorstep, with a butler and footman and a maid or so behind her. And she just said: ‘So glad you’ve
come,’ as if I’d run down to lunch from a town ten miles away, instead of having come half the world over at
the call of two urgent telegram.
The girl was out with the hounds.
And that poor devil beside me was in an agony. Absolute, hopeless, dumb agony such as passes the
mind of man to imagine.
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3) giustapposizioni con valore allusivo modo ellittico: (funzione registica del narratore)
I, 1, 12:
Captain Ashburnham also had a ‘heart’. But, whereas a yearly month or so at Nauheim tuned him up to
exactly the right pitch for the rest of the twelvemonth, the twomonths or so were only just enough to keep
poor Florence alive from year to year. The reason for his heart was, approximately, polo, or too much hard
sportsmanship in his youth. The reason for poor Florence’s broken years was a storm ast sea upon our first
crossing to Europe, and the immediate reasons for our imprisonment in that continent were doctor’s orders.
They said that even the short Channel crossing might well kill the poor thing.
4) sospensioni:
I, 2, 28:
And, what the devil! For whose benefit did she do it? For that of the bath attendant? of the passers-by? I
don’t know. Anyhow, it can’t have been for me, for never, in all the years of the life, never on any possible
occasion, or in any other place did she so smile to me, mockingly, invitingly. Ah, she was a riddle; but then,
all other women are riddles. And it occurs to me that some way back I began a sentence that I have never
finished...
II, 2, 93:
Let it go that [le ragioni per cui Leonora non voleva il divorzio], for the moment. I will write more about her
motives later, perhaps.
Metanarratività:
1) Ripiegamento metatestuale del narratore sull’atto narrativo:
a) (Dis-)ordine del racconto come sintomo della verità dell’atto narrativo e della storia:
IV, 1, 167:
I have, I am aware, told this story in a very rambling way so that it may be difficult for anyone to find their
path through what may be a sort of maze. I cannot help it. It have stuck to my idea of being in a country
cottage with a silent listener, hearing between the gusts of the wind and amidst the noises of the distant sea,
the story as it comes. And when one discusses an affair – a long, sad affair – one goes back, one goes
forward. One remembers points that one has forgotten and one explains them all the more minutely since one
recognizes that one has forgotten to mention them in their proper places and that one may have given, by
omitting them, a false impression. I console myself with thinking that this is a real story and that, after all,
real stories re probably told best in the way a person telling a story would tell them. They will then seem
most real.
IV, 2, 192:
Heaven knows what happened in Leonora after that. She certainly does not herself know. She
probably said a good deal more to Edward than I have been able to report; but that is all that she has told me
and I am not going to make up speeches. (p. 192)
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IV, 3, 200:
You are to remember that all this happened a month before Leonora went into the girl’s room at night. I have
been casting back again; but I cannot help it. It is so difficult to keep all these people going. I tell you abot
Leonora and bring her up to date; then about Edward, who has fallen behind. And then the girl gets
hopelessly left behind. I wish I could put it down in diary form. Thus: On the 1st September they returned to
Naiheim. Leonora at once took her bed. By the 1st of Coctober they were all going to to meets together.
Nancy had already observed very fully that Edward was strange in his manner. About the 6 th of that month
Edward gave the horse to young Selmes, and Nancy had cause to believe that her aunt did not love her uncle.
On the 20th she read the account of the divorce cas, which is reported in the papers of the 18 th and the two
folowing days. On the 23rd she read the conversation with her aunt in the hall – about marriage in general and
about her possible marriage. Her aunt’s coming to her bedroom did not occur until the 12th of November.
b) Continui ritorni sul discorso volti a fornire chiarimenti e correzioni:
I, 1, 11:
[…] I had known the shallows.
I don’t mean to say that we were not acquainted with many English people. Living, as we perforce
lived, in Europe, and being, as we perforce were, leisured Americans, which is as much as to say that we
were un-American, we were thrown very much into the society of the richer English. Paris, you see, was our
home….
II, 1, p. 84
God, how they worked me! It was those two between them who really elaborated the rules. I have told you
something about them – how I had to head conversations, for all those eleven years, off such topics as love,
poverty, crime, and so on. But, looking over what I have written, I see that I have unintentionally misled you
when I said that Florence was never out of my sight. Yet that was the impression that I really had until just
now. When I come to think of it she was out of my sight most of the time. (p. 84)
c) Dubbi del narratore sulla perspicuità del suo racconto:
I, 2, 19:
I don’t know how it is best to put this thing down – whether it would be better to try and tell the story from
the beginning, as if it were a story; or whether to tell it from this distance of time, as it reached me from the
lips of Leonora or from those of Edward himself.
d) Giudizi del narratore sulla storia (funzione ideologica) che fin dall’incipit – e
ripetutamente nel corso del romanzo – definisce ‘tristissimia’:
I, I, 11
This is the saddest story I have ever read.
d) Assunzione di diversi punti di vista e presentazione di vari modi di vedere il mondo
(punto di vista ottico, ma anche ideologico):
I, 2, 21:
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[…] I guess Florence got all she wanted out of one look at a place. She had the seeing eye.
I haven’t, unfortunately, so that the world is full of places to which I want to return – towns with the
blinding white sun upon them; stone pines against the blue of the sky; corners of gables, all carved and
painted with stags and scarlet flowers and crowstepped gables with the little saint at the top; and grey and
pink palazzi and walled towns a mile or so back from the sea, on the Medietarranean, between Leghorn and
Naples. Not one of them did we see more than once, so that the whole for me is like spots of colour in an
immense canvas. Perhaps if it weren’t so I should have something to catch hold of now.
III, 5, 162:
And now, I suppose, I must give you Leonora’s side of the case…
IV, 1, 167:
At any rate, I think I have brought my story up to the date of Maisie Maidan’s death. I mean that I
have explained everything that went before it from the several points of view that were necessary – from
Leonora’s, from Edward’s and, to some extent, from my own. You have the facts for the trouble of finding
them; you have the points of view as far as I could ascertain them.
2) Riferimenti narratore a stesso e al contesto in cui scrive:
I, 1, pp. 12-13:
Florence’s people, as is so often the case with the inhabitants of Connecticut, came from the neighbourhood
of Fordinbridge, where the Ashburnham’s place is. From there, at this moment, I am actually writing.
You may as well ask why I write. And yet my reasons are quite many. For it is not unusual in human
beings who have witnessed the sack of a city or the falling to pieces of a people to desire to set down what
they have witnessed for the benefit of unknown heirs or of generations infinitely remote; or, if you please,
just to get the sight of their heads.
IV, 1, 167-168:
I may, in what follows, be a little hard on Florence; but you must remember that I have been writing away at
this story now for six months and reflecting longer upon these affairs.
IV, 5, 210:
I am writing this, now, I should say, a full eighteen months after the words that end my last chapter.
Since writing the words ‘until my arrival’, which I see end that paragraph, I have seen again for a glimpse,
from a swift train, Beaucaire with the beautiful white tower, Tarascon with the square castle, the great
Rhone, the immense stretches of the Crau. I have rushed through all Provence – and all Provence no longer
matters. It is no longer in the olive hills that I shall find my Heaven; because there is only Hell…
3) Funzione comunicativa del narratore: il lettore silenzioso
I, 2, 15, 19;
For I swear to you that they were the model couple. […]
You are to image that, however much her [Florences’s] bright personality came from Stamford, Connecticut,
she was yet a graduate of Poughkeepsie.
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I, 2, 20:
Is all this digression or isn’t it digression? Again I don’t know. You, the listener, sit opposite me. But you are
so silent. You don’t tell me anything. I am, at any rate, trying to get you to see what sort of life it was I led
with Florence and what Florence was like.
I, 2, 19:
So I shall just imagine myself for a fortnight or so at one side of the fireplace of a country cottage,
with a sympathetic soul opposite me. And I shall go on talking, in a low voice while the sea sounds in the
distance and overhead the great black flood of wind polishes the bright stars. […]
Temi:
1) epistemologico: fino a che punto si può conoscere la realtà?
1.1. scollamento fra essere e apparire
1.2 la parola e lo sguardo: come comunicano gli uomini (riservatezza/chiacchiera)
2) visione nichilistica e il nonsenso umano – la tristezza
3) visione pseudo-darwinista della società umana costruita sulla teoria della sopravvivenza del più
‘normale’
4) il doppio
1) tema epistemologico (asse del non-sapere):
3) Ingenuità e inattendibilità del narratore:
II, 1, 68:
And what chance had I against those three hardened gamblers, who were all in league to conceal their hands
from me? What earthly chance? They were three to one – and they made me happy. Oh God, they made me
so happy that I doubt if even paradise, that shall smooth out all temporal wrongs, shall ever give me the like.
And what could they have done better, or what could they have done that could have been worse?
I don’t know…
I suppose that, during all that time I was a deceived husband and that Leonora was pimp in for
Edward. That was the cross that she had to take up during her long calvary of a life…
You ask how it feels to be a deceived husband. Just Heavens, I do not know. It feels just nothing at
all. It is not Hell, certainly it is not necessarily Heaven. So I suppose it is the intermediate stage. What do hey
call it? Limbo. No, I feel nothing about it.
II, 1, 89:
Well, there you have the position, as clear as I can make it – the husband an ignorant fool, the wife a cold
sensualist with imbecile fears – for I was such a fool that I should never have known what she was or was
not – and the blackmailing lover. And then the other lover came along…
II, 1, 92:
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But think of the fool that I was…
III, 2, 101:
So that was the first knowledge I had that Florence had committed suicide. It had never entered my
had. You may think that I had been singularly lacking in suspiciousness; you may consider me even to have
been an imbecile. But consider the position.
IV, 2, 181:
Why, at that date I still believed that Florence had been perfectly virtuous after her marriage to me. I had not
figured out that she could have played it so low down as to continue her intrigue with that fellow under my
roof. Well, I was a fool. But I did not think much about Florence at that date. My mind was occupied with
what was happening at Branshaw.
IV, 6, 219-220:
I don’t attach any particular importance to these generalizations of mine. They may be right, they may be
wrong; I am only an ageing American with very little knowledge of life. You may take my generalizations or
leave them. But I am pretty certain that I am right in the case of Nancy Rufford – that she had loved Edward
Ashburnham very deeply and tenderly. […]
Anyhow, I don’t know whether, at this point, Nancy Rufford loved Edward Ashburnham. I don’t
know whether she even loved him when, on getting, at Aden, the news of his suicide she went mad. Because
that may just as well have been for the sake of Leonora as for the sake of Edward. Or it may have been for
the sake of both of them. I don’t know. I know nothing. I am very tired.
2) Ignoranza dell’animo umano:
I, 1, 14-15:
I know nothing – nothing in the world – of the hearts of men. I only know that I am alone – horribly
alone. No hearthstone will ever again witness, for me, friendly intercourse. No smoking-room will ever be
other than peopled with incalculable simulacra amidst wreaths. Yet, in the name of God, what should I know
if I don’t know the life of the hearth and of the smoking-room, since my whole life has been passed in those
places?
I, 1, 17:
I don’t want you to think that I am writing Teddy Ashbrurnham down a brute. I don’t believe he was. God
knows, perhaps all men are like that. For as I’ve said what do I know even of the smoking-room? […]
I, 1, p. 16-17:
I don’t know; I don’t know; was that last remark of hers [racconto di Leonora hemselv al suo
tentato adulterio don Rodney Bayham] the remark of a harlot, or is it what every decent woman, county
family or not county family, thinks at the bottom of that? Who knows?
Yes, if one doesn’t know that at this hour and day, at this pitch of civilization to which we have
attained, after all the preaching of all the moralists, and all the teachings of all the mothers to all the
daughters in saecula saeculorum… but perhaps that is what all mothers teach all daughters, not with lip but
with eyes, or with heart whispering to heart. And, if one doesn’t know as much as that about the first thing in
the world, what does one know and why is one here?
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I, 1, 18:
[…] At what, then, does it all work out? Is the whole thing a folly and a mockery? Am I no better than a
eunuch or is the proper man – the man with the right to existence – a raging stallion forever neighing after
his neighbour’s womankind?
I don’t know. And there is nothing to guide us. And if everything is so nebulous about a matter so
elementary as the morals of sex, what is there to guide us in the more subtle morality of all other personal
contacts? Or are we meant to act on impulse alone? It is all darkness.
I, 4, 39:
But upon my word, I don’t know how we put in our time. How does one put in one’s time? How is it
possible to have achieved nine years and to have nothing whatever to show for it? Nothing whatever, you
understand. Not so much as a bone penholder, carved to resemble a chessman and with a hole in the top
through which you could see four views of Nauheim. And, as for experience, as for knowledge of one’s
fellow beings – nothing either. Upon my word, I couldn’t tell you offhand whether the lady who sold so
expensive violets at the bottom of the road that leads to the station, was cheating me or no; I can’t say
whether the porter who carried our traps across the station at Leghorn was a thief or no when he said that the
regular tariff was a lira a parcel. The instances of honesty that one comes across in this world are just as
amazing as the instances of dishonesty. After forty-five years of mixing with one’s kind, one ought to have
acquired the habit of being able to know something about one’s fellow beings. But one doesn’t.
3) Scontro culturale America/Inghilterra:
I, I, 11:
[…] We had known the Ashburnhams for nine seasons of the town of Nauheim with an extreme intimacy –
or, rather with an acquaintanceship as loose and easy and yet as close as good glove’s with your hand. My
wife and I knew Captain and Mrs Ashburnham as well as it was possible to know anybody, and yet, in
another sense, we knew nothing at all abouth them. This is, I believe, a state of things only possible with
English people of whom, till today, when I sit down to puzzle out what I know of this sad affair, I knew
nothing whatever. Six months ago I had never been to England, and, certainly, I had never sounded the
depths of an English heart. I had known the shallows.
II, 1, 90:
She [Nancy] had for him [Edward] such enthusiasm that, although even now I do not understand the
technicalities of English life, I can gather enough.
1.1 essere/apparire, vero/falso (isotopia della recita):
a) Il falso minuetto degli Ashburnham e dei Dowell: cos’è vero e cos’è falso?:
I, 1, p. 13-14:
Some one has said that the death of a mouse from cancer is the whole sack of Rome by the Goths, and I
swear to you that the breaking up of our little four-square coterie was such another unthinkable event. […]
[…] we were an extraordinarily safe castle. We were, if you will, one of those tall ships with the white sails
upon a blue sea, one of those things that seem the proudest and the safest of all the beautiful and safe things
that God has permitted the mind of men to frame. Where better could one take refuge? Where better?
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Permanence? Stability? I can’t believe that that long, tranquil life, which was just stepping a minuet,
vanished in four crashing days at the end of nine years and six weeks. Upon my word, yes, our intimacy was
like a minuet, simply because on every possible occasion and in every possible circumstance we knew where
to go, where to sit, which table we unanimously should choose; and we could rise and go, all four together,
without a signal from any one of us, always to the music of the Kur orchestra, always in the temperate
sunshine, or, if it rained, in discreet shelters. No, indeed, it can’t be gone. You can’t kill a minuet de la cour.
You may shut up the music-book, close the harpsichord; in the cupboard and presses the rats my destroy the
white satin favours. The mob may sack Versailles; the Trianon may fall, but surely the minuet – the minuet
itself is dancing itself into the furthest stars, even as our minuet of the Hessian bathing places must be
stepping itself still. Isn’t there any heaven where old beautiful dances, old beautiful intimacies prolong
themselves? Isn’t there any Nirvana pervaded by the faint thrilling of instruments that have fallen into the
dust of wormwood but that yet had frail, tremulous, and everlasting souls?
No, by God, it is false! It wasn’t a minuet that we stepped, it was a prison – a prison full of
screaming hysterics, tied down so that they might not outsound the rolling of our carriage wheels as we went
along the shaded avenues of the Taunus Wald.
And yet I swear by the sacred name of my creator that it was true. It was true sunshine; the true
music; the true splash of the fountains from the mouth of stone dolphins. For, if for me we were four people
with the same tastes, with the same desires, acting – or, no, not acting – sitting here and there unanimously,
isn’t that the truth? If for nine years I have possessed a goodly apple that is rotten at the core and discover its
rottenness only in nine years and six months less four days, isn’t true to say that for nine years I possessed a
goodly apple? So it may well be with Edward Ashburnham, with Leonora his wife and with poor dear
Florence. And, if you come to think of it, isn’t it a little odd that the physical rottenness of at least two pillars
of our four-square house never presented itself to my mind as a menace to security? It doesn’t so present
itself now though the two of them are actually dead. I don’t know…
I, 1, 18:
[…] Or again: Edward Ashburnham was the cleanest looking sort of chap; - an excellent magistrate, a first
rate soldier, one of the best landlords, so they say, in Hampshire, England. To the poor and to hopeless
drunkards, as I myself have witnessed, he was like a painstaking guardian. And he never told a story that
couldn’t have gone into the columns of the Filed more than once or twice in all the nine years of my
knowing him. He didn’t even like hearing them; he would fidget and get up and go out to buy a cigar or
something of that sort. You would have said that he was just exactly the sort of chap that you could have
trusted your wife with. And I trusted mine and it was madness.
I, 1, 15-16:
For I swear to you that they were the model couple. He was as devoted as it was possible to be
without appearing fatuous. So well set up, with such honest blue eyes, such a touch of stupidity, such a warm
goodheartedness! And she – so tall, so splendid in the saddle, so fair! Yes, Leonora was extraordinarily fair
and so extraordinarily the real thing that she seemed too good to be true. You don’t, I mean, as a rule, get it
all so superlatively together. To be the county family, to look the county family, to be so appropriately and
perfectly wealthy; to be so perfect in manner – even just to the saving touch of insolence that seems to be
necessary. To have all that and to be all that! No, it was too good to be true. And yet, only this afternoon,
talking over the whole matter she said to me: ‘Once I tried to have a lover but I was sick at the heart, so
utterly worn out that I had to send him away’.
IV, 2, 182-183:
[…] to me who was hourly with them they appeared like tender, ordered and devoted people, smiling,
absenting themselves at the proper intervals; driving me to meets – just good people! How the devil – how
the devil do they do it?
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b) La recita:
I, 5, 50:
Well, she [Florence] was a good actress. And I would be in hell, I tell you. For in Florence I had at once a
wife and an unattained mistress – that is what it comes to – and in the retaining of her in this world I had my
occupation, my career, my ambition. […] Leonora was a good actress too. By Jove she was good! I tell you,
she would listen to me by the hour, evolving my plans for a shock-proof world. It is true that, at times, I used
to notice about her an air of inattention as if she were listening, a mother, to the child at her knee, or as if,
precisely, I were myself the patient.
III, 1, 114:
I suppose that my inner soul – my dual personality – had realized long before that Florence was a
personality of paper – that she represented a real human being with a heart, with feelings, with sympathies
and with emotions only as a bank-note represents a certain quantity of glod.
IV, 6, 221:
And there it is also that all those three presented to the world the spectacle of being the best of good people. I
assure you that during my stay for that fortnight in that fine old house, I never so much as noticed a single
thing that could have affected that good opinion. And even when I look back, knowing the circumstances, I
can’t remember a single thing any of them said that could have betrayed them. I can’t remember, right up to
the dinner, when Leonora read out that telegram – not the tremor of an eyelash, not the shaking of a hand. It
was just a pleasant country houseparty.
And Leonora kept it up jolly well, for even longer than that – she kept it up as far as I was concerned
until eight days after Edward’s funeral.
IV, 6, 223:
It is queer the fantastic things that quite good people will do in order to keep up their appearance of
calm pococurantism. For Edward Ashburnham and his wife called me half the world over in order to sit oin
the back seat of a dog-cart whilst Edward drove the girl to the railway station from which she was to take her
hemselve to India. They wanted, I suppose, to have a witness of the calmness of that function. […] It was a
most amazing business, and I think that it would have been better in the eyes of God if they had all attempted
to gouge at each other’s eyes with carving knives. But they were ‘good people’.
IV, 6, 225:
He [Edward] swung round on his heel and, large, slouching, and walking with a heavy deliberate pace, he
went out of the station. I followed him and got up beside him in the high dog-cart. It was the most horrible
performance I had ever seen.
1.2 lo sguardo e la parola: come comunicano gli uomini:
a) lo sguardo:
I, 3, 33:
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I had forgotten about his [Edward’s] eyes. They were as blue as the sides of a certain type of box of matches.
When you looked at them carefully you saw that they were perfectly honest, perfectly straightforward,
perfectly, perfectly stupid. But the brick pink of his complexion, running perfectly level to the brick pink of
his inner eyelids, gave them a curious, sinister expression – like a mosaic of blue porcelain set in a pink
china.
[…] And there he was, standing by the table. I was looking at him with my back to the screen. And
suddenly, I saw two distinct expressions flicker across his immobile eyes. How the deuce did they do it,
those unflinching blue eyes with the direct gaze? For the eyes hemselves never moved, gazing over my
shoulder towards the screen. And the gaze was perfectly level and perfectly direct and perfectly unchanging.
I suppose that the lids really must have rounded themselves a little and perhaps the lips moved a little too, as
if he should be saying: ‘There you are, my dear.’ At any rate, the expression was that of pride, of satisfaction,
of the possessor. I saw him once afterwards, for a moment, gaze upon the sunny fields of Branshaw and say:
‘All this is my land!’
And then again, the gaze was perhaps more direct, harder, of possible – hardy too –. It was a
measuring look; a challenging look.
I, 3, 37:
Her eyes too were blue and dark and the eyelids were so arched that they gave you the whole round
of the irises. And it was a most remarkable, a most moving glance, as if for a moment a lighthouse had
looked at me. […] And so her eyes asked: ‘Is this man trustworthy in money matters; is he likely to try to
play the lover; is he likely to let his women be troublesome? Is he, above all, likely to babble about my
affairs?’
And, suddenly, into those cold, slightly defiant, almost defensive china blue orbs, there came a
warmth, a tenderness, a friendly recognition… oh, it was very charming and very touching – and quite
mortifying. It was the look of a mother to her son, of a sister to her brother. It implied trust; it implied the
want of any necessity of barriers. By God, she looked at me as if I were an invalid – as any kind of woman
may look at a poor chap in a bath chair. And, yes, from that day forward she always treated me and not
Florence as if I were the invalid.
IV, 1, 172-173:
With the answering gaze of Edward into Florence’s blue and uplifted eyes, she knew that it had all gone. She
knew that that gaze meant that those two had had long conversations of an intimate kind – about their likes
and dislikes, about their natures, about their views of marriage. […] But, having watched Edward all her life,
she knew that that lying on of hands, that answering of gaze with gaze, meant that thing was unavoidable.
Edward was such a serious person.
b) la parola:
I, 4, 39:
So began those nine years of uninterrupted tranquillity. They were characterized by an extraordinary want of
any communicativeness on the part of the Ashburnhams to which we, on our part, replied by leaving out
quite as extraordinarily, and nearly as completely, the personal note. Indeed, you may take it that what
characterized our relationship was an atmosphere of taking everything for granted. The given proposition
was, that we were all ‘good people’.
IV, 1, 168-169:
For Florence was vulgar; Florence was a common flirt who would not, at the last, lacher prise; and Florence
was an unstoppable talker. You could not stop her; nothing would stop her. Edward and Leonora were at
least proud and reserved people. Pride and reserve are not the only things in life; perhaps they are not even
the best things. But if they happen to be your particular virtues you will all to piece if you let them go.
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IV, 2, 182:
What had happened was just Hell. Leonora had spoken to Nancy; Nancy had spoken to Edward; Edward had
spoken to Leonora – and they had talked and talked. And talked. You have to imagine horrible pictures of
gloom and half lights, and emotions running through silent nights – through whole nights. You have to
imagine my beautiful Nancy appearing suddenly to Edward, rising up at the foot of his bed, with her long
hair falling, like split cone of shadow, in the glimmer of a night-light that burned beside him. You have to
imagine her, a silent, a no doubt agonized figure, like a spectre, suddenly offering herself to him – to save his
reason! And you have to imagine his frantic refusal – and talk. And talk! My God! (p. 182)
2) tema nichilistico del nonsenso umano – la tristezza:
I, 1, 14:
[…] Isn’t there any heaven where old beautiful dances, old beautiful intimacies prolong themselves? Isn’t
there any Nirvana pervaded by the faint thrilling of instruments that have fallen into the dust of wormwood
but that yet had frail, tremulous, and everlasting souls?
No, by God, it is false!
IV, 5, 210:
[…] ‘Credo in unum Deum omnipotentem… Credo in unum Deum omnipotentem’. Those are the only
reasonable words she uttered; those are the only words, it appears, that she ever will utter. I suppose that they
are reasonable words; it must be extraordinarily reasonable for her, if she can say that she believes in an
Omnipotent Deity. Well, there it is. I am very tired of it all…
V, 1, 151:
I call this the Saddest Story, rather than ‘The Ashburnham Tragedy’, just because it is so sad, just because
there was no current to draw things along to a swift and inevitable end. There is about it none of the
elevation that accompanies tragedy; there is about it no nemesis, no destiny. Here were two noble people –
for I am convinced that both Edward and Leonora had noble natures – here, then, were two noble natures,
drifting down life, like fireships afloat on a lagoon and causing miseries, heart-aches, agony of the mind and
death. And they themselves steadily deteriorated. And why ? For what purpose? To point what lesson? It is
all darkness.
V, 1, 151-152:
There is not even any villain in the story – for even Major Basil, the lady of the husband who next, and
really, comforted the unfortunate Edward – even Major Basil was not a villain in this piece. He was a slack,
loose, shiftless sort of fellow – but he did not do anything to Edward.
V, 5, 213:
Well, it is all over. Not one of us has got what he really wanted. Leonora wanted Edward, and she has got
Rodney Bayham, pleasant enough sort of sheep. Florence wanted Branshaw, and it is who have bought it
from Leonora. I didn’t really want it; what I wanted mostly was to cease being a nurse-attendant. Well, I am
a nurse-attendant. Edward wanted Nancy Rufford, and I have got her. Only she is mad. It is a queer and
fantastic world. Why can’t people have what they want? The things were all there to content everybody; yet
everybody has the wrong thing. Perhaps you can make head or tail of it; it is beyond me.
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Is there any terrestrial paradise where, amidst the whispering of the olive-leaves, people can be with
whom they like and have what they like and take their ease in shadows and in coolness? Or are all men’s
lives like the lives of us good people – like the lives of the Ashburnhams, of the Dowells, of the Ruffords –
broken, tumultuous, agonized, and unromantic lives, periods punctuated by screams, by imbecilities, by
deaths, by agonies? Who the delvil knows? (p. 213)
3) prospettiva pseudo-darwiniana della società umana e teoria della sopravvivenza del più
‘normale’:
IV, 5, 210:
The end was perfectly plain to each of them – it was perfectly manifest at this stage that, if the girl
did not, in Leonora’s phrase, ‘belong to Edward,’ Edward must die, the girl must lose her reason because
Edward died – and, that after a time, Leonora, who was the coldest and the strongest of the three, would
console herself by marrying Rodney Bayham and have a quiet, comfortable good time. That end, on that
night, whilst Leonora sat in the girl’s bedroom and Edward telephoned down below – that end was plainly
manifest. The girl, plainly, was half-mad already; Edward was half-dead; only Leonora, active, persistent,
instinct with her cold passion of energy, was ‘doing things’. What then, should they have done? It worked
out in the extinction of two very splendid personality – for Edward and the girl were splendid personality, in
order that a third personality, more normal, should have, after a long period of trouble, a quiet, comfortable,
good time.
IV, 5, 214:
[…] the conventional line; it was in tune with the tradition of Edward’s house. I daresay it worked out for the
greatest good of the body politic. Conventions and traditions, I suppose, work blindly but surely for the
preservation of the normal type; for the extinction of proud, resolute and unusual individuals.
Edward was the normal man, but there was too much of the sentimental about him; and society does
not need too many sentimentalists. Nancy was a splendid creature, but she had about her a touch of madness.
Society does not need individuals with touches of madness about them. So Edward and Nancy found
themselves steamrolled out and Leonora survives, the perfectly normal type, married to a man who is rather
like a rabbit. For Rodney Bayham is rather like a rabbit; and I hear that Leonora is expected to have a baby in
three months’ time.
IV, 6, 227-228:
Society must go on, I suppose, and society can only exist if the normal, if the virtuous, and the slightly
deceitful flourish, and if the passionate, the headstrong, and the too-truthful are condemned to suicide and
madness. But I guess that I myself, in my fainter way, come into the category of the passionate, of the
headstrong, and the too-truthful. For I can’t conceal from myself the fact that I loved Edward Ashburnham –
and that I love him because he was just myself. If I had had the courage and virility and possibly also the
physique of Edward Ashburnham I should, I fancy, have done much what he did. He seems to me like a large
elder brother who took me out on several excursions and did many dashing things whilst I just watched him
robbing the orchards, from a distance. And, you see, I am just as much of a sentimentalist as he was…
Yes, society must go on; it must breed, like rabbits. That is what we are here for. But then, I don’t
like society – much. I am that absurd figure, an American millionaire, who has bought one of the ancient
haunts of English peace. I sit here, in Edward’s gun-room, all day and all day in a house that is absolutely
quiet. No one visits me, for I visit no one. No one is interested in me, for I have no interests. […]
But at any rate, there is always Leonora to cheer you up; I don’t want to sadden you. Her husband is
quite an economical person of so normal a figure that he can get quite a large proportion of his clothes readymade. That is the great desideratum of life, and that is the end of my story. The child is to be brought up as a
Romanist. (p. 228)
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4) Il doppio
IV, 5
Yes, no doubt I am jealous. In my fainter sort of way I seem to perceive myself following the lines of
Edward Ashburnham. I suppose that I should really like to be a polygamist; with Nancy, and with Leonora,
and with Maisie Maidan and possibly even with Florence. I am no doubt like every other man-, only,
probably because of my American origin I am fainter. At the same time I am able to assure you that I am a
strictly respectable person. I have never done anything that the most anxious mother of a daughter or the
most careful dean of a cathedral would object to. I have only followed, faintly, and in my unconscious
desires, Edward Ashburnham. (p. 213)
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PART I
1
1- […] We had known the Ashburnhams for nine seasons of the town of Nauheim with an extreme intimacy
– or, rather with an acquaintanceship as lose an easy and yet as close as a good glove’s with your hand. My
wife and I knew Captain and Mrs Ashburnham as well as it was possible to know anybody, and yet, in
another sense, we knew nothing at all about them. This is, I believe, a state of things only possible with
English people of whom, till today, when I sit down to puzzle out what I know of this sad affair, I knew
nothing whatever. Six months ago I had never been to England, and, certainly, I had never sounded the
depths of an English heart. I had known the shallows. (p. 11)
2- Captain Ashburnham also had a ‘heart’. But, whereas a yearly month or so at Nauheim tuned him up to
exactly the right pitch for the rest of the twelvemonth, the twomonths or so were only just enough to keep
poor Florence alive from year to year. The reason for his heart was, approximately, polo, or too much hard
sportsmanship in his youth. The reason for poor Florence’s broken years was a storm ast sea upon our first
crossing to Europe, and the immediate reasons for our imprisonment in that continent were doctor’s orders.
They said that even the short Channel crossing might well kill the poor thing. (p. 12)
3- […] we were an extraordinarily safe castle. We were, if you will, one of those tall ships with the white
sails upon a blue sea, one of those things that seem the proudest and the safest of all the beautiful and safe
things that God has permitted the mind of men to frame. Where better could one take refuge? Where better?
Permanence? Stability? I can’t believe that that long, tranquil life, which was just stepping a minuet,
vanished in four crashing days at the end of nine years and six weeks. Upon my word, yes, our intimacy was
like a minuet, simply because on every possible occasion and in every possible circumstance we knew where
to go, where to sit, which table we unanimously should choose; and we could rise and go, all four together,
without a signal from any one of us, always to the music of the Kur orchestra, always in the temperate
sunshine, or, if it rained, in discreet shelters. No, indeed, it can’t be gone. You can’t kill a minuet de la cour.
You may shut up the music-book, close the harpsichord; in the cupboard and presses the rats my destroy the
white satin favours. The mob may sack Versailles; the Trianon may fall, but surely the minuet – the minuet
itself is dancing itself into the furthest stars, even as our minuet of the Hessian bathing places must be
stepping itself still. Isn’t there any heaven where old beautiful dances, old beautiful intimacies prolong
themselves? Isn’t there any Nirvana pervaded by the faint thrilling of instruments that have fallen into the
dust of wormwood but that yet had frail, tremulous, and everlasting souls?
No, by God, it is false! It wasn’t a minuet that we stepped, it was a prison – a prison full of
screaming hysterics, tied down so that they might not outsound the rolling of our carriage wheels as we went
along the shaded avenues of the Taunus Wald.
And yet I swear by the sacred name of my creator that it was true. It was true sunshine; the true
music; the true splash of the fountains from the mouth of stone dolphins. For, if for me we were four people
with the same tastes, with the same desires, acting – or, no, not acting – sitting here and there unanimously,
isn’t that the truth? If for nine years I have possessed a goodly apple that is rotten at the core and discover its
rottenness only in nine years and six months less four days, isn’t true to say that for nine years I possessed a
goodly apple? So it may well be with Edward Ashburnham, with Leonora his wife and with poor dear
Florence. And, if you come to think of it, isn’t it a little odd that the physical rottenness of at least two pillars
of our four-square house never presented itself to my mind as a menace to security? It doesn’t so present
itself now though the two of them are actually dead. I don’t know… (pp. 13-14)
4- […] Or again: Edward Ashburnham was the cleanest looking sort of chap; - an excellent magistrate, a first
rate soldier, one of the best landlords, so they say, in Hampshire, England. To the poor and to hopeless
drunkards, as I myself have witnessed, he was like a painstaking guardian. And he never told a story that
couldn’t have gone into the columns of the Filed more than once or twice in all the nine years of my
knowing him. He didn’t even like hearing them; he would fidget and get up and go out to buy a cigar or
something of that sort. You would have said that he was just exactly the sort of chap that you could have
trusted your wife with. And I trusted mine and it was madness. (p. 18)
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5 - […] At what, then, does it all work out? Is the whole thing a folly and a mockery? Am I no better than a
eunuch or is the proper man – the man with the right to existence – a raging stallion forever neighing after
his neighbour’s womankind?
I don’t know. And there is nothing to guide us. And if everything is so nebulous about a matter so
elementary as the morals of sex, what is there to guide us in the more subtle morality of all other personal
contacts? Or are we meant to act on impulse alone? It is all darkness. (p. 18)
2.
1- I don’t know how it is best to put this thing down – whether it would be better to try and tell the story
from the beginning, as if it were a story; or whether to tell it from this distance of time, as it reached me from
the lips of Leonora or from those of Edward himself.
So I shall just imagine myself for a fortnight or so at one side of the fireplace of a country cottage,
with a sympathetic soul opposite me. And I shall go on talking, in a low voice while the sea sounds in the
distance and overhead the great black flood of wind polishes the bright stars. […] (p. 19)
2- […] I guess Florence got all she wanted out of one look at a place. She had the seeing eye.
I haven’t, unfortunately, so that the world is full of places to which I want to return – towns with the
blinding white sun upon them; stone pines against the blue of the sky; corners of gables, all carved and
painted with stags and scarlet flowers and crowstepped gables with the little saint at the top; and grey and
pink palazzi and walled towns a mile or so back from the sea, on the Medietarranean, between Leghorn and
Naples. Not one of them did we see more than once, so that the whole for me is like spots of colour in an
immense canvas. Perhaps if it weren’t so I should have something to catch hold of now. (p. 21)
3- You see, the first think they [the two aunts] said to me when I called in on Florence in the little, ancient,
colonial, wooden house beneath the high, thin-leaved elms – the first question they asked me was not how I
did but what did I do. And I did nothing. I suppose I ought to have done something, but I didn’t see any call
to do it. Why does one do things? I just drifted in on Florence at a Browning tea, or something of the sort in
Fourteenth Street, which was then still residential. I don’t know why I had gone to New York; I don’t know
why I had gone to the tea. I don’t see why Florence should have gone to that sort of spelling bee. It wasn’t
the place at which, even then, you expected to find a Poughkeepsie graduate. I guess Florence wanted to
raise the culture of the Stuveysant crown and did it as she might have gone in slumming. Intellectual
slumming, that was what it was. (p. 21)
4- For I was solemnly informed that if she became excited over anything or if her emotions were really
stirred her little heart might cease to beat. (p. 22)
5- Yes, it was a great worry [sistemare l’eredità dello zio distribuendola alle varie associazioni di carità
indicategli]. And just as I got things roughly settled I received the extraordinary cable from Ashburnham
begging me to come back and have a talk with him. And immediately afterwards came one from Leonora
saying, “Yes, please, do come. You could be so helpful.” It was as if he had sent the cable without consulting
her and had afterwards told her. Indeed, that was pretty much what had happened, except that he had told the
girl and the girl had told his wife. I arrived, however, too late to be of any good if I could have been of any
good. And then I had my first taste of English life. It was amazing. It was overwhelming. I never shall forget
the polished cob that Edward, beside me, drove; the animal’s action, it’s high-stepping, its skin that was like
satin. And the peace! And the red cheeks! And the beautiful, beautiful old house. (p. 25)
6- And it came into my head – for Teddy Ashburnham, you remember, had cabled to me ‘to come and have a
talk’ with him – that it was unbelievable that anything essentially calamitous could happen to that place and
those people. I tell you it was the very spirit of peace. And Leonora, beautiful and smiling, with her coils of
yellow hair, stood on the top doorstep, with a butler and footman and a maid or so behing her. And she just
said: ‘So glad you’ve come,’ as if I’d run down to lunch from a town ten miles away, instead of having come
half the world over at the call of two urgent telegrams.
The girl was out with the hounds, I think.
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And that poor devil beside me was in agony. Absolute, hopeless, dumb agony such as passes the
mind of man to imagine. (p. 26)
3.
1- But the feeling that I had when, whilst poor Florence was taking her morning bath, I stood upon the
carefully swept steps of the Englisher Hof, looking at the carefully arranged trees in tubs upon the carefully
arranged gravel whilst carefully arranged people walked past in carefully calculated gaiety, at the carefully
calculated hour, the tall trees of the public gardens, going up to the right; the reddish stone of the baths –or
were they white half-timber châlets? Upon my word I have forgotten, I who was there so often. That will
give you the measure of how much I was in the landscape. I could find my way blindfolded to the hot rooms,
to the douche rooms, to the fountain in the centre of the quadrangle where the rusty water gushes out. Yes I
could find my way bindfolded. I know the exact distances. From the Hotel Regina you took one hundred and
eighty-seven paces, then turning sharp, lefthanded, four hundred and twenty took you straight down to the
fountain. From the Englisher Hof, starting on the sidewalk, it was ninety-seven paces and the same four
hundred and twenty, but turning lefhanded this time.
And now you understand that, having in the world to do – but nothing whatever! I fell into the habit
of counting my footsteps. (p. 27)
2- And her hair was copper-coloured, and the heels of her shoes were exceedingly high, so that she tripped
upon the points of her toes. And when she came to the door of the bathing place, and when it opened to
receive her, she would look back at me with a little coquettish smile, so that her cheek appeared to be
caressing her shoulder.
I seem to remember that […] she wore and immensely broad Leghorn hat – like the Chapeau de
Paille of Rubens, only very white. The hat would be tied with a lightly knotted scarf of the same stuff as her
dress. And round her neck would be some simple pink, coral beads. And her complexion had a perfect
clearness, a perfect smoothness…
Yes, that is how I most exactly remember her, in that dress, in that hat, looking over her shoulder at
me so that the eyes flashed very blue – dark pebble blue… (pp. 27-28)
3- And, what the devil! For whose benefit did she do it? For that of the bath attendant? of the passers-by? I
don’t know. Anyhow, it can’t have been for me, for never, in all the years of the life, never on any possible
occasion, or in any other place did she so smile to me, mockingly, invitingly. Ah, she was a riddle; but then,
all other women are riddles. And it occurs to me that some way back I began a sentence that I have never
finished... (p. 28)
4- Natty, precise, well-brushed, conscious of being rather small amongst the long English, the lank
Americans, the round Germans, and the obese Russian Jewesses, I should stand there, tapping a cigarette on
the outside of my case, surveying for a moment the world in the sunlight. But a day was to come when I was
never to do it again alone. You can imagine, therefore, what the coming of the Ashburnham meant to me. (p.
28)
5- I have forgotten the aspect of many things, but I shall never forget the aspect of the dining-room of the
Hotel Excelsior on that evening – and on so many other evenings. Whole castles have vanished from my
memory, whole cities that I have never visited again, but that white room, festooned with papier-maché fruits
and flowers; the tall windows; the many tables; the black screen round the door with three gloden cranes
flying upward on each panel; the palm-tree; the cold expensive elegance; the mien of the diners as they came
in evry evening – the air of earnestness as if they must go through a meal prescribed by the Kur authorities
and their air of sobriety as if they must seek not by any means to enjoy their meals – those things I shall not
easily forget. And then, one evening, in the twilight I saw Edward Ashburnham lounge round the screen into
the room. (p. 28)
6- His face hitherto had, in the wonderful English fashion, espressed nothing whatever. Nothing. There was
in it neither hope nor fear; neither boredom nor satisfaction. He seemed to perceive no soul in that crowded
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room; he might have been walking in a jungle. I never came across such a perfect expression before and I
never shall again. It was insolence and not insolence; it was modesty and not modesty. His hair was fair,
extraordinarily ordered in a wave, running from the left temple to the right; his face was a light brick-red,
perfectly uniform in tint up to the roots of the hair itself; his yellow moustache was as stiff as a toothbrush
and I verily believe that he had his black smoking jacket thickened a little over the shoulder-blades so as to
give himself the air of the slightest possible stoop. (p. 30)
7- Good God, what did they all see in him? for I swear there was all there was of him, inside and out, though
they said he was a good soldier. Yet, Leonora adored him with a passion that was like an agony, and hated
him with an agony that was as bitter as the sea. How could he arouse anything like a sentiment, in anybody?
What did he even talk to them about – when they were under four eyes? – Ah, well, suddenly, as if
by a flash of inspiration, I know. For all good soldiers are sentimentalists – all good soldiers of that type.
Their profession, for one thing, is full of the big words, courage, loyalty, honour, constancy. (p. 31)
8- Constancy! Isn’t that the queer thought? And yet, I must add that poor dear Edward was a great reader –
he would pass hours lost in novels of a sentimental type – novels in which typewriter girls married
Marquises and governesses Earls. And in his books, as a rule, the course of true love ran as smooth as
buttered honey. And he was fond of poetry, of a certain type – and he could even read a perfectly sad love
story. I have seen his eyes filled with tears at reading of hopeless parting. And he loved, with a sentimental
yearning, all children, puppies, and the feeble generally…
So, you see, he would have plenty to gurgle about to a woman – with that and his sound common
sense about martingales and his – still sentimental – experiences as a country magistrate; and with his
intense, optimistic belief that the woman he was making love to at the moment was the one he was destined,
at last, to be eternally constant to… (p. 32)
8- And I was quite astonished, during his final burst out to me – at the very end of things, when the poor girl
was on her way to that fatal Brindisi and he was trying to persuade himself and me that he had never really
cared for her – I was quite astonished to observe how literary and how just his expressions were. He talked
like quite a good book – a book not in the least cheaply sentimental. You see, I suppose he regarded me not
so much as a man. I had to be regarded as a woman or a s a solicitor. Anyhow, it burst out of him on that
horrible night. And then, next morning, he took me over to the Assizes and I saw how, in a perfectly calm
and business-like way, he set to work to secure a verdict of not guilty for a poor girl, the daughter of one of
his tenants, who had been accused of murdering her baby. He spent two hundred pounds on her defence…
Well, that was Edward Ashburnham. (p. 32)
9- I had forgotten about his eyes. They were as blue as the sides of a certain type of box of matches. When
you looked at them carefully you saw that they were perfectly honest, perfectly straightforward, perfectly,
perfectly stupid. But the brick pink of his complexion, running perfectly level to the brick pink of his inner
eyelids, gave them a curious, sinister expression – like a mosaic of blue porcelain set in a pink china.
[…] And there he was, standing by the table. I was looking at him with my back to the screen. And
suddenly, I saw two distinct expressions flicker across his immobile eyes. How the deuce did they do it,
those unflinching blue eyes with the direct gaze? For the eyes themselevs never moved, gazing over my
shoulder towards the screen. And the gaze was perfectly level and perfectly direct and perfectly unchanging.
I suppose that the lids really must have rounded themselves a little and perhaps the lips moved a little too, as
if he should be saying: ‘There you are, my dear.’ At any rate, the expression was that of pride, of satisfaction,
of the possessor. I saw him once afterwards, for a moment, gaze upon the sunny fields of Branshaw and say:
‘All this is my land!’
And then again, the gaze was perhaps more direct, harder, of possible – hardy too –. It was a
measuring look; a challenging look. (p. 33)
10- I looked round over my shoulder and saw, tall, smiling brilliantly and buoyant – Leonora. And, little and
fair, and as radiant as the track of sunlight along the sea – my wife.
That poor wretch! to think that he was at that moment in a perfect devil of a fix, and there he was,
saying at the back of his mind: ‘It might just be done.’ It was like a chap in the middle of the eruption of a
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volcano, saying that he might just manage to bolt into the tumult and set fire to a haystack. Madness?
Predestination? Who the devil knows? (p. 34)
11- She seemed to stand out of her corsage a s white marble bust might out of of a black Wedgwood
vase. I don’t know.
I loved Leonora always and, today, I would very cheerfully lay down my life, what is left of it, in her
service. But I am sure I never had the beginnings of a trace of what is called the sex instinct towards her.
And I suppose – no I am certain that she never had it towards me. As far as I am concerned I think it was
those white shoulders that did it. I seemed to feel when I looked at them that, if ever I should press my lips
upon them that they would be slightly cold – not icily, not without a touch of human heat, but, as they say of
baths, with the chill off. I seemed to feel chilled at the end of my lips when I looked at her…
No, Leonora always appeared to me at her best in a blue tailor-made. Then her glorious hair wasn’t
deadened by her white shoulders. Certain women’s lines guide your eyes to their necks, their eyelashes, their
lips, their breasts. But Leonora’s seemed to conduct your gaze always to her wrist. And her wrist was at its
best in a black or a dog-skin glove and there was always a gold circlet with a little chain supporting a very
small golden key to a dispatch box. Perhaps it was that in which she locked up her heart and her feelings. (p.
36)
12- Her eyes too were blue and dark and the eyelids were so arched that they gave you the whole
round of the irises. And it was a most remarkable, a most moving glance, as if for a moment a lighthouse had
looked at me. […] And so her eyes asked: ‘Is this man trustworthy in money matters; is he likely to try to
play the lover; is he likely to let his women be troublesome? Is he, above all, likely to babble about my
affairs?’
And, suddenly, into those cold, slightly defiant, almost defensive china blue orbs, there came a
warmth, a tenderness, a friendly recognition… oh, it was very charming and very touching – and quite
mortifying. It was the look of a mother to her son, of a sister to her brother. It implied trust; it implied the
want of any necessity of barriers. By God, she looked at me as if I were an invalid – as any kind of woman
may look at a poor chap in a bath chair. And, yes, from that day forward she always treated me and not
Florence as if I were the invalid. (p. 37)
4.
1- So began those nine years of uninterrupted tranquillity. They were characterized by an extraordinary want
of any communicativeness on the part of the Ashburnhams to which we, on our part, replied by leaving out
quite as extraordinarily, and nearly as completely, the personal note. Indeed, you may take it that what
characterized our relationship was an atmosphere of taking everything for granted. The given proposition
was, that we were all ‘good people’. (p. 39)
2- But upon my word, I don’t know how we put in our time. How does one put in one’s time? How is it
possible to have achieved nine years and to have nothing whatever to show for it? Nothing whatever, you
understand. Not so much as a bone penholder, carved to resemble a chessman and with a hole in the top
through which you could see four views of Nauheim. And, as for experience, as for knowledge of one’s
fellow beings – nothing either. Upon my word, I couldn’t tell you offhand whether the lady who sold so
expensive violets at the bottom of the road that leads to the station, was cheating me or no; I can’t say
whether the porter who carried our traps across the station at Leghorn was a thief or no when he said that the
regular tariff was a lira a parcel. The instances of honesty that one comes across in this world are just as
amazing as the instances of dishonesty. After forty-five years of mixing with one’s kind, one ought to have
acquired the habit of being able to know something about one’s fellow beings. But one doesn’t. (p. 39)
3- But the inconvenient – well, hang it all, I will say it – the damnable nuisance of the whole thing is, that
with all the taking for granted, you never really get an inch deeper than the things I have catalogued [le
azioni che sono ammesse dalle persone per bene, dal “cold bath in the morning” alla frequentazione dei
“diplomatic circles”]
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I can give you a rather extraordinary instance of this. I can’t remember whether it was in our first
year – the first year of us four at Nauheim, because, of course, it would have been the fourth year of Florence
and myself – but it must have been in the first or second year. And that gives the measure at once of the
extraordinariness of our discussion and of the swiftness with which intimacy had grown up between us. On
the one hand we seemed to start out on the expedition so naturally and with so little preparation, that it was
as if we must have made many such excursions before; and our intimacy seemed so deep… (p. 41)
4- I must say that, until the astonishment came, I got nothing but pleasure out of the little expedition. I like
catching the two-forty; I like the slow, smooth roll of the great big trains – and they are the best trains in the
world! I like being drawn through the green country and looking at it through the clear glass of the great
windows. Though, of course, the country isn’t really green. The sun shines, the earth is blood red and purple
and red and green and red. And the oxen in the ploughlands are bright varnished brown and black and
blackish purple; and the peasants are dressed in the black and white of magpies; and there are great flocks of
magpies too. Or the peasants dresses in another field where there are little mounds of hay that will be greygreen on the sunny side and purple in the shadows – the peasants’dresses are vermillion with emerald green
ribbons and purple skirts and white shirts and black velvet stomachers. Still, the impression is that you are
drawn through brilliant green meadows that run away on each side to the dark purple fir-woods; the basalt
pinnacles; the immense forests. And there is meadow-sweet at the edge of the streams, and cattle. (p. 44)
5- I was aware of something treacherous, something frightful, something evil in the day. I can’t define it and
can’t find a simile for it. It wasn’t as if a snake had looked out of a hole. No, it was as if my heart had missed
a beat. It was as if we were going to run and cry out; all four of us in separate directions, averting our heads.
In Ashburnham’s face I know that there was absolute panic. I was horribly frightened and then I discovered
that the pain in my left wrist was caused by Leonora’s clutching it:
‘I can’t stand this’, she said with a most extraordinary passion; ‘I must get out of this’. (p. 47)
6- ‘Don’t you see?’ she said, ‘don’t you see what’s going on?’ The panic again stopped my heart. I muttered,
I stuttered – I don’t know how I got the words out:
‘No! What’s the matter? Whatever’s the matter?’
She looked me straight in the eyes; and for a moment I had the feeling that those two blue discs were
immense, were overwhelming, were like a wall of blue that shut me off from the rest of the world. I know it
sounds absurd; but that is what it did feel like.
‘Don’t you see,’ she said, with a really horrible bitterness, with a really horrible lamentation in her
voice, ‘Don’t you see that that’s the cause of the whole miserable affair; of the whole sorrow of the world?
And of the eternal damnation of you an me and them…’
I don’t remember how she went on; I was too frightened; I was too amazed. […] But I know that
when I came out of it she was saying: ‘Oh, where are all the bright, happy, innocent beings in the world?
Where’s happiness? One reads of it in books!’
She ran her hand with a singular clawing motion upwards over her forehead. Her eyes were
enormously distended; her face was exactly that of a person looking into the pit of hell and seeing horrors
there. And then suddenly she stopped. She was, most amazingly, just Mrs Ashburnham again. Her face was
perfectly clear, sharp and defined; her hair was glorious in its golden coils. Her nostrils twitched with a sort
of contempt. She appeared to look with interest at a gypsy caravan that was coming over a little bridge far
below us.
‘Don’t you know,’ she said, in a clear hard voice, ‘don’t you know that I’m an Irish Catholic?’. (pp.
47-48).
5.
1- It was a frenzy that now I can hardly realize. I can understand it intellectually. You see, in those days I
was interested in people with ‘hearts’. There was Florence, there was Edward Ashburnham – or, perhaps, it
was Leonora that I was more interested in. I don’t mean in the way of love. But, you see, we were both of the
same profession – at any rate as I saw it. And the profession was that of keeping heart patients alive. (p. 49)
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2- Well, she was a good actress. And I would be in hell, I tell you. For in Florence I had at once a wife and
an unattained mistress – that is what it comes to – and in the retaining of her in this world I had my
occupation, my career, my ambition. (p. 50)
3- Leonora was a good actress too. By Jove she was good! I tell you, she would listen to me by the hour,
evolving my plans for a shock-proof world. It is true that, at times, I used to notice about her an air of
inattention as if she were listening, a mother, to the child at her knee, or as if, precisely, I were myself the
patient. (p. 50)
4- You understand that there was nothing the matter with Edwards Ashburnham’s heart – that he had thrown
up his commission and had left India and come half the world over in order to follow a woman who had
really had a ‘heart’ to Nauheim. That was the sort of sentimental ass he was. For, you understand, too, that
they really needed to live in India, to economize, to let the house at Branshaw Teleragh. (p. 50)
5- But just think of that poor wretch … I, who have surely the right, beg you to think of that poor wretch. Is
it possible that such a luckless devil should be so tormented by blind and inscrutable destiny? For there is no
other way to think of it. None. I have the right to say it, since for years he was my wife’s lover, since he
killed her, since he broke up all the pleasantnesses that there were in my life. There is no priest that has the
right to tell me that I must not ask pity for him, from you, silent listener beyond the hearth-stone, from the
world, or from the God who created in him those desires, those madnesses… (p. 51)
6- That would have been, you know, in 1895, about nine years before the date of which I am talking – the
date of Florence’s getting hold over Leonora; for that was what it amounted to… Well, Mrs Ashburham had
simply forced Edward to settle all his property upon her. She could force him to do anything; in his clumsy,
good-natured, inarticulate way he was as frightened of her as of the devil. And he admired her enormously,
and he was as fond of her as any man could be of any woman. She took advantage of it to treat him as if he
had been a person whose estates are being managed by the Court of Bankruptcy. I suppose it was the best
thing for him. (p. 57)
7- Thus Leonora had accepted Maisie Maidan almost with resignation – almost with a sigh of relief. She
really liked the poor child – she had to like somebody. And, at any rate, she felt she could trust Maisie – she
could trust her not to rook Edward for several thousands a week, for Maisie had refused to accept so much as
trinket ring from him. It is true that Edward gurgled and raved about the girl in a way that she had never yet
experienced. But that, too, was almost a relief. I think she would really have welcomed it if he could have
come across the love of his life. It would have given her a rest. (p. 62)
8- So I do set down a good deal of Leonora’s mismanagement of poor dear Edward’s case to the peculiarly
English form of her religion. Because, of course, the only thing to have done for Edward would have been to
let him sink down until he became a tramp of gentlemanly address, having, maybe, chance love affairs upon
the highways. He would have done so much less harm; he would have been much less agonized too. At any
rate, he would have had fewer chances of ruining and of remorse. For Edward was great at remorse. (p. 60)
9- Because it was, of corse, an odd intimacy. If you look at it from the outside nothing could have
been more unlikely than that Leonora, who is the proudest creature on God’s earth, would have struck up an
acquaintanceship with two casual Yankees whom she could not really have regarded as being much more
than a carpet beneath her feet. You may ask what she had to be proud of. Well, she was a Powys married to
an Ashburnham – I suppose that gave her the right to despise casual Americans as long as she did it
unostentatiously. I don’t know what anyone has to be proud of. She might have taken pride in her patience,
in her keeping her husband out of the bankruptcy court. Perhaps she did.
At any rate that was how Florence got to know her. She came round a screen at the corner of the
hotel corridor and found Leonora with the gold key that hung from her wrist caught in Mrs Maidan’s hair
just before dinner. There was not a single word spoken. Little Mrs Maidan was very pale, with a red mark
down her left cheek, and the key would not come out of her black hair. It was Florence who had to
disentangle it, for Leonora was in such a state that she could not have brought herself to touch Mrs Maidan
without growing sick. (pp. 54-55)
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10- But Leonora could see that, without the shadow of a doubt, the incident gave Florence a hold
over her. It let Florence into things and Florence was the only created being who had any idea that the
Ashburnhams were not just good people with nothing to their tails. She determined at once, not so much to
give Florence the privilege of her intimacy – which would have been the payment of a kind of blackmail – as
to keep Florence under observation until she could have demonstrated to Florence that she was not in the
least jealous of poor Maisie. So that was why she had entered the dining-room arm in arm with my wife, and
why she had so markedly planted herself at our table. (p. 65)
11- She was hitting a naughty child who had been stealing chocolates at an inopportune moment.
It was certainly an inopportune moment. For, with the opening of that blackmailing letter from that
injured brother officer, all the old terrors had redescended upon Leonora. […] The matter was one of the
divorce case, of course, and she wanted to avoid publicity as much as Edward did […]. (p. 63)
12-He had made, however, the mistake of not telling Leonora where he was going, so that, having
seen him go to his room to fetch the code for the telegram, and seeing, two hours later, Maisie Maidan come
out of his room, Leonora imagined that the two hours she had spent in silent agony Edward had spent with
Maisie Maidan in his arms. That seemed to her to be too much. (p. 64)
13- And there she sat with me in that hall, long after Florence had gone to bed, so that I might
witness her gay reception of that pair. She [Leonora] could play up. (p. 65)
14- And that enables me to fix exactly the day of our going to the town of M-. For it was the very
day poor Mrs Maidan died. We found her dead when we got back – pretty awful, that, when you come to
figure out what it all means… (p. 66)
15- At any rate the measure of my relief when Leonora said that she was an Irish Catholic gives you
the measure of my affection for that couple. It was an affection so intense that even to this day I cannot think
of Edward without sighing. (p. 66)
16- ‘Do accept the situation. I confess that I do not like your religion. But I like you so intensely. I
don’t mind saying that that I have never had anyone to be really fond of, and I do not believe that anyone has
ever been fond of me, as I believe you really to be.’
‘Oh, I’m fond enough of you,’ she said. ‘Fond enough to say that I wish every man was like you. But
there are others to be considered.’ She was thinking, as a matter of fact, of poor Maisie.[…]
‘Oh, I accept the situation,’ she said at last, ‘if you can.’ (p. 66)
6.
1- And I want you to understand that, from that moment until after Edward and the girl and Florence were
all dead together, I had never the remotest glimpse, not the shadow of a suspicion, that there was anything
wrong, as the saying is. For five minutes, then, I entertained the possibility that Leonora might be jealous;
but there was never another flicker in that flame-like personality. How in the world should I get it? (p. 68)
2- And what chance had I against those three hardened gamblers, who were all in league to conceal their
hands from me? What earthly chance? They were three to one – and they made me happy. Oh God, they
made me so happy that I doubt if even paradise, that shall smooth out all temporal wrongs, shall ever give
me the like. And what could they have done better, or what could they have done that could have been
worse?
I don’t know… (p. 68)
3- I suppose that, during all that time I was a deceived husband and that Leonora was pimp in for Edward.
That was the cross that she had to take up during her long calvary of a life…
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You ask how it feels to be a deceived husband. Just Heavens, I do not know. It feels just nothing at
all. It is not Hell, certainly it is not necessarily Heaven. So I suppose it is the intermediate stage. What do hey
call it? Limbo. No, I feel nothing about it. (p. 68)
4- But upon an immense plain, suspended in mid-air, I seem to see three figure, two of them clasped close in
an intense embrace, and one intolerably solitary. It is in black and white, my picture of that judgement, an
etching, perhaps; only I cannot tell an etching from a photographic reproduction. And the immense plain is
the hand of God, stretching out for miles and miles, with great spaces above it and below it. And they are in
the sight of God, and it is Florence that is alone… (pp. 68-69)
5- For I hate Florence. I hate Florence with such a hatred that I would not spare her an eternity of loneliness.
She need not have done what she did. She was an American, a New Englander. She had not the hot passions
of these Europeans. She cut out that poor imbecile of an Edward – and I pray god that he is really at peace,
clasped close in the arms of that poor, poor girl! And, no doubt, Maisie Maidan will find her young husband
again, and Leonora will burn, clear and serene, a northern light and one of the archangels of God. And me.
… Well, perhaps, they will find me an elevator to run … But Florence…
She should not have done it. She should not have done it. It was playing it too low down. She cut out
poor dear Edward from sheer vanity; she meddled between him and Leonora from a sheer, imbecile spirit of
district visiting. Do you understand that, whilst she was Edward’s mistress, she was perpetually trying to
reunite him to his wife? She would gabble on to Leonora about forgiveness – treating the subject from the
bright, American point of view. And Leonora would treat her like the whore she was. (pp. 69-70)
6- I fancy Florence was just about beginning her cutting out of poor dear Edward by addressing to
him some words of friendly warning as to the ravages he might be making in the girl’s heart. That would be
the sort of way she would begin. And Edward would have sentimentally assured her that there was nothing in
it; that Maisie was just a poor little rat whose passage to Nauheim his wife had paid out of her own pocket.
That would have been enough to do the trick. (p. 72)
7- Now, as soon as she came in, she perceived, sticking out beyond the bed, a small pair of feet in
high-heeled shoes. Maisie had died in the effort to strap up a great portmanteau. She had died so grotesquely
that her little body had fallen forward into the trunk, and it had closed upon her, like the jaws of a gigantic
alligator. The key was in the hand. Her dark hair, like the hair of a Japanese, had come down and covered her
body and her face. (p. 73)
8- He soon got over it. Indeed, it was the one affair of his about which he never felt much remorse. (p. 74)
PART II
1.
1- That fellow had his hands always in the pockets of his odious, square-shouldered, broad-hipped, American
coats, and his dark eyes were always full of ominous appearances. He was, besides, too fat. Why, I was much
the better man… (p. 84)
2- God, how they worked me! It was those two between them who really elaborated the rules. I have told you
something about them – how I had to head conversations, for all those eleven years, off such topics as love,
poverty, crime, and so on. But, looking over what I have written, I see that I have unintentionally misled you
when I said that Florence was never out of my sight. Yet that was the impression that I really had until just
now. When I come to think of it she was out of my sight most of the time. (p. 84)
3- I never quite knew, either, how she and Edward got rid of Jimmy. I fancy that fat and disreputable raven
must have had his six golden front teeth knocked down his throat by Edward one morning whilst I had gone
out to by some flowers in Rues de la Paix, leaving Florence and the flat in charge of those two. And serve
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him very right, is all that I can say. He was bad sort of Blackmailer; I hope Florence does not have his
company in the next world. (87)
4- She became for me a rare and fragile object, something burdensome, but very frail. Why, it was as if I had
been given a thin-shelled pullet’s egg to carry on my palm from Equatorial Africa to Hoboken. Yes, she
became for me, as it were, the subject of a bet – the trophy of an athlete’s achievement, a parsley crown that
is the symbol of his chastity, his soberness, his abstentions, and of his inflexible will. Of intrinsic value as a
wife, I think she had none at all for me. I fancy I was not even proud of the way she dressed. (p. 87)
5- Well, there you have the position, as clear as I can make it – the husband an ignorant fool, the
wife a cold sensualist with imbecile fears – for I was such a fool that I should never have known what she
was or was not – and the blackmailing lover. And then the other lover came along…
Well, Edwards Ashburnham was worth having. Have I conveyed to you the splendid fellow that he
was – the fine soldier, the excellent landlord, the extraordinarily kind, careful and industrious magistrate, the
upright, honest, fair-dealing, fair-thinking, public character? I suppose I have not conveyed it to you. The
truth is, that I never knew it until the poor girl came along – the poor girl who was just as straight, as
splendid, as upright as he. I swear she was. I suppose I ought to have known. (p. 89)
6- ‘Well, Leonora, a man sees more of these things than even a wife. And, let me tell you, that in all
the years I’ve known Edward he has never, in your absence, paid a moment’s attention to any other woman –
not by the quivering of an eyelash. I should have noticed. And he talks of you as if you were one of the
angels of God’.
‘Oh,’ she came up to the scratch, as you could be sure Leonora would always come up to the scratch,
‘I am perfectly sure that he always speaks nicely of me.’ (p. 92)
2.
1- Let me think where we were. Oh, yes… that conversation took place on the 4th of August 1913. I
remember saying to her that, on that day, exactly nine years before, I had made their acquaintance, so that it
had seemed quite appropriate and like a birthday speech to utter my little testimonial to my friend Edward
(pp. 92-93)
2- I find, on looking at my diaries, that on the 4th of September, 1904, Edward accompanied Florence and
myself to Paris, where we put him up till the twenty-first of that month. He made another short visit to us in
December of that year – the first year of our acquaintance. It must have been during this visit that he knocked
Mr Jimmy’s teeth down his throat. I daresay Florence had asked him to come over for that purpose. (p. 93)
3- No doubt he was also a very passionate lover. But I am convinced that he was sick of Florence within
three years of even interrupted companionship and the life that she led him… (p. 93)
4- Well, I think I have made it pretty clear. Let me come to the 4th of August, 1913, the last day of
my absolute ignorance – and, I assure you, of my perfect happiness. For the coming of that dear girl only
added to it all. (o. 95)
5- ‘Do you know who that is?’ he asked. ‘The last time I saw the girl she was coming out of the
bedroom of a young man called Jimmy at five o’clock in the morning. In my house at Ledbury. You saw her
recognized me.’ He was standing on his feet, looking down at me. I don’t know what I looked like. At any
rate, he gave a sort of gurgle and then stuttered:
‘Oh, I say…’ […] (p. 96)
6- She had not locked the door – for the first time of our married life. She was lying, quite respectably
arranged, unlike Mrs Maidan, on her bed. She had a little phial that rightly should have contained nitrate of
amyl, in her right hand. That was on the 4th of August, 1913.
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PART III
1.
1- Now that is to me a very amazing thing – amazing for the light of possibilities that it casts into the human
heart. For I had never had the slightest conscious idea of marrying the girl; I never had the slightest idea even
of caring for her. I must have talked in an odd way, as people do who are recovering from an anaesthetic. It
is as if one had a dual personality, the one I being entirely unconscious of the other. I had thought nothing; I
had said such an extraordinary thing.
I don’t know that analysis of my own psychology matters at all to this story. I should say that it
didn’t or, at any rate, that I had given enough of it. But that odd remark of mine had a strong influence upon
what came after. I mean, that Leonora would probably never have spoken to me at all about Florence’s
relations with Edward if I hadn’t said, two hours after my wife’s death:
‘Now I can marry the girl.’ (p. 99)
2- So that was the first knowledge I had that Florence had committed suicide. It had never entered
my had. You may think that I had been singularly lacking in suspiciousness; you may consider me even to
have been an imbecile. But consider the position. (p. 101)
3- There seemed to bob into my consciousness, like floating globes, the faces o those three. Now it would be
the bearded, monarchical, benevolent head of the Grand Duke; then the sharp-featured, brown, cavalrymoustached feature of the chief of the police; then the globular, polished and high-collared vacuousness that
represented Monsieur Schontz, the proprietor of the hotel. At times one head would be there alone, at another
the spiked helmet of the official would be close to the healthy baldness of the prince; then M. Schontz’s oiled
locks would push in between the two. […] That was how it presented itself to me. (p. 103)
4- But I have given you absolutely the whole of my recollection of that eventing, as it is the whole of
my recollection of the succeeding three or four days. I was in a state just simply cataleptic. […] I was the
walking dead.
Well, those are my impressions. (pp. 103-104)
5 Edward Ashburnham told me all this in his final outburst. I have told you that, upon that occasion, he
became deucedly vocal. I didn’t pump him. I hadn’t any motive. At that time I didn’t in the least connect him
with my wife. But the fellow talked like a cheap novelist. – Or like a very good novelist for the matter of
that, if it’s the business of a novelist to make you see things clearly. And I tell you I see that thing as clearly
as if it were a dream that never left me. (p. 104)
6- Anyhow, there you have the picture, the immensely tall trees, elms most of them, towering and feathering
away into the black mistiness that trees seem to gather about them at night; he silhouettes of those two upon
the seat; the beams of light coming from the Casino, the woman all in black peeping with fear behind the
tree-trunk. It is melodrama; but I can’t help it. (p. 105)
7- I suppose that that was the most monstrously wicked thing that Edward Ashburnham ever did in
his life. And yet I am so near to all these people that I cannot think any of them wicked. It is impossible of
me to think of Edward Ashburnham as anything but straight, upright and honourable. That, I mean, is, in
spite of everything, my permanent view of him. I try at times by dwelling on some of the things that he did to
push that image of him away, as you might try to push aside a large pendulum. But it always comes back –
the memory of his innumerable acts of kindness, of his efficiency, of his unspiteful tongue. He was such a
fine fellow.
So I feel myself forced to attempt to excuse him in this as in so many other things. It is, I have no
doubt, a most monstrous thing to attempt to corrupt a young girl just out of a convent. But I think Edward
had no idea at all of corrupting her. I believe that he simply loved her. He said that that was the way of it and
I, at least, believe him and I believe too that she was the only woman he ever really loved. He said that that
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was so; and he did enough to prove it. And Leonora said that it was so and Leonora knew him to the bottom
of his heart.
I have come to be very much of a cynic in these matters; I mean that it is impossible to believe in the
permanence of man’s or woman’s love. Or, at any rate, it is impossible to believe in the permanence of an
early passion. (p. 108)
8- He desires to see with the same eyes, to touch with the same sense of touch, to hear with the same ears, to
lose his identity, to be enveloped, to be supported. […] We are all so afraid, we are all so alone, we all so
need from the outside the assurance of our own worthiness to exist. (p. 109)
9- And yet I do believe that for every man there comes at last a woman – or no, that is the wrong
way of formulating it. For every man there comes at last a time of life when the woman who then sets her
seal upon his imagination has set the seal for good. He will travel over no more horizons; he will never again
set the knapsack over his shoulders; he will retire from those scenes. He will have gone out of business.
That at any rate was the case with Edward and the poor girl. (p. 109)
10- And my story was concerning itself with Florence – with Florence, who heard those words from behind
the tree. That of course is only conjecture, but I think the conjecture is pretty well justified. You have the fact
that those two went out, that she followed them almost immediately afterwards through the darkness and, a
little later, she came running back to the hotel with that pallid face and the hand clutching her dress over her
heart. It can’t have been only Bagshawe. Her face was contorted with agony before evr her eyes fell upon me
or upon him beside him. But I dare say Bagshawe may have been the determining influence in her suicide.
[…] If it had been merely a matter of Edward’s relations with the girl I dare say Florence would have faced it
out. […] But Mr Bagshawe and the fact that the date was the 4th of August must have been too much for her
superstitious mind. You see, she had two things that she wanted. She wanted to be a great lady, installed in
Branshaw Teleragh. She wanted also to retain my respect. (pp. 110-111)
11- She had been born on the 4th of August; she had started to go round the world on the 4th of August; she
had become a low fellow’s mistress on the 4th of August. On the same day of the year she had married me;
on that 4th she had lost Edward’s love, and Bagshawe had appeared like a sinister omen – like a grin on the
face of Fate. It was the last straw. (p. 113)
12- I suppose that my inner soul – my dual personality – had realized long before that Florence was a
personality of paper – that she represented a real human being with a heart, with feelings, with sympathies
and with emotions only as a bank-note represents a certain quantity of glod. I know that sort of feeling came
to the surface in me the moment the man Bagshawe told me that he had seen her coming out of that fellow’s
bedroom. I thought suddenly that she wasn’t real; she was just a mass of talk out of guidebooks, of drawings
out of fashion-plates. It is even possible that, if that feeling had not possessed me, I should have run up
sooner to her room and might have prevented her drinking the prussic acid. But I just couldn’t do it; it would
have been like chasing a scarp of paper – an occupation ignoble for a grown man. (p. 114)
2.
1- She was tall and strikingly thin; she had a tortured mouth, agonized eyes, and a quite
extraordinary sense of fun. You might put it that at times she was exceedingly grotesque and at times
extraordinarily beautiful. Why, she had the heaviest head of black hair that I have ever come across; I used to
wonder how she could bear the weight of it. She was just over twenty-one and at times she seemed as old as
the hills, at times not much than sixteen. At one moment she would be talking of the lives of the saints and at
the next she would be tumbling all over the lawn with the St Bernard puppy. She could ride to hounds like a
Maenad and she could sit for hours perfectly still, steeping handkerchief in vinegar when Leonora had one of
her headaches. She was, in short, a miracle of patience who could be almost miraculously impatient. It was,
no doubt, the convent training that effected that. (pp. 116-117)
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1-And to think that that vivid white thing, that saintly and swan-like being – to think that… Why, she was
like the sail of a ship, so white and so definite in her movements. And to think that she will never… Why,
she will never do anything again. I can’t believe it… (p. 120)
3.
1- This is perhaps the most miserable part of the entire story. For it is miserable to see a clean
intelligence waver; and Leonora wavered. (p. 126)
2- He was keen on soldiering, keen on mathematics, on land-surveying, on politics and, by a queer warp of
his mind, on literature. Even when he was twenty-two he would pass hours reading one of Scott’s novels or
the chronicles of Froissart. (p. 128)
3- I have seen it [he photograph] the seven girls, all in white dresses, all very much alike in feature – all,
except Leonora, a little heavy about the chins and a little stupid about the eyes. I dare say it would have made
Leonora, too, look a little heavy and a little stupid, for it was not a good photograph. But the black shadow
from one of the branches of the apple tree right across her face, which is all but invisible. (p. 129)
4- I don’t know that a very minute study of their progress towards complete disunion is necessary.
Perhaps it is. But there are many things that I cannot well make out, about which I cannot well question
Leonora, or about which Edward did not tell me. I do not know that there was ever any question of love from
Edward to her. […]
He had the greatest admiration for her. He admired her for her truthfulness, for her cleanness of
mind, and the clean-run-ness of her limbs, for her efficiency, for the fairness of her skin, for the gold of her
hair, for her religion, for her sense of duty. It was a satisfaction to take her about with him.
Buts she had not for him a touch of magnetism. I suppose, really, he did not love her because she
was never mournful; what really made him feel good in life was to comfort somebody who would be darkly
and mysteriously mournful. (pp. 130-131)
4.
1. It is very difficult t ogive an all-round impression of any man. I wonder how far I have succeeded
with Edward Ashburnham. I dare say I haven’t succeeded at all. (p. 140)
2- But I guess I have made it hard for you, O silent listener, to get that impression. Anyhow, I hope I have
not given you the idea that Edward Ashburnham was a pathological case. He wasn’t. He was just a normal
man and very much of a sentimentalist. (p. 141)
3- Who in this world knows anything of any other heart – or of his own? I don’t mean to say that one cannot
form an average estimate of the way a person will behave. But one cannot be certain of the way any man will
behave in every case – and until one can do that a ‘character’ is of no use to anyone. That, for instance, was
the way with Florence’s maid in Paris. […] So, perhaps, it was with Edward Ashburnham.
O perhaps it wasn’t. No, I rather think it wasn’t. (p. 144)
4- He wanted only moral support at the hands of some female, because he found men difficult to talk to
about ideals. Indeed, I do not believe that he had, at any time, any idea of making any one his mistress. That
sounds queer; but I believe it is quite true as a statement of character. (p. 146)
5- […] if he played polo and was an excellent dancer he did the one for the sake of keeping himself fit and
the other because it was a social duty to show himself at dances, and, when there, to dance well. He did
nothing for fun except what he considered to be his work in life. (p. 146)
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6- In anyone less sentimental than Edward that would not have mattered. With Edward it was fatal. For, such
was his honourable nature, that for him to enjoy a woman’s favours made him feel that she had a bond on
him for life. That was the way it worked out in practice. Psychologically it meant that he could not have a
mistress without falling violently in love with her. (p. 147)
5.
1- I call this the Saddest Story, rather than ‘The Ashburnham Tragedy’, just because it is so sad, just because
there was no current to draw things along to a swift and inevitable end. There is about it none of the
elevation that accompanies tragedy; there is about it no nemesis, no destiny. Here were two noble people –
for I am convinced that both Edward and Leonora had noble natures – here, then, were two noble natures,
drifting down life, like fireships afloat on a lagoon and causing miseries, heart-aches, agony of the mind and
death. And they themselves steadily deteriorated. And why? For what purpose? To point what lesson? It is
all darkness. (p. 151)
2- There is not even any villain in the story – for even Major Basil, the lady of the husband who next,
and really, comforted the unfortunate Edward – even Major Basil was not a villain in this piece. He was a
slack, loose, shiftless sort of fellow – but he did not do anything to Edward. (pp. 151-152)
2- I suppose she was his mistress, but I never heard it from Edward, of course. I seem to gather that they
carried it on in a high romantic fashion, very proper to both of them – or, at any rate, for Edward; she seems
to have been a tender and gentle soul who did what he wanted. I do not mean to say that she was without
character; that was her job, to do what Edward wanted. So I figured it out, that for those five tears, Edward
wanted long passages of deep affection kept up in long, long talks and that every now and then they ‘fell’,
which would give Edward an opportunity for remorse and an excuse to lend the Major another fifty. I don’t
think that Mrs Basil considered it to be ‘falling’; she just pitied him and loved him. (p. 155)
3- Major Basil discovered his wife’s relation with Edward just before he was sent to his other station. I don’t
know whether that was a blackmailer’s adroitness or just a trick of destiny. He may have known of it all the
time or he may not. An any rate, he got hold of, just about then, some letters and things. I do not know how it
was arranged; I cannot imagine how even a blackmailer can make his demands. I suppose there is some sort
of way of saving your face. I figure the Major is disclosing the letters to Edward with furious oaths, then
accepting his explanations that the letters were perfectly innocent if the wrong construction were not upon
them. Then the Major would say: ‘I say, old chap, I’m deuced hard up. Couldn’t you lend me three hundreds
or so? I fancy that was how it was. And, year by year, after that there would come a letter from the Major,
saying that he was deuced hard up and couldn’t Edward lend him three hundred or so? (p. 158)
4- That was the most unsettling to Edward of all his affaire. It made him suspect that he was
incostant. The affair with the Dolciquita he had seized up as a short attack of madness like hydrophobia. His
relations with Mrs Basil had not seemed to him to imply moral turpitude of a gross kind. The husband had
been complaisant; they had really loved each other; his wife was very cruel to him. He thought that Mrs
Basil had been his soul-mate, separated from him by an unkind fate – something sentimental of that sort.
But he discovered that, whilst he was still writing long weekly letters to Mrs Basil, he was beginning
to be furiously impatient if he missed seeing Maisie Maidan during the course of day. (p. 159)
5- It struck him that Leonora must be intending to manage his loves as she managed his money affaire and it
made her more hateful to him – and more worthy of respect. (p. 160)
6- It was horrible, in their relationship at that time, that whatever she did caused him to hate her. he
hated her when he found that she proposed to set him up as the Lord of Branshaw again – as a sort of dummy
lord, in swaddling clothes. He imagined that she had done this in order to separate him from Maisie Maidan.
Hatred hung in all the heavy nights and filled the shadowy corners of the room. So when he heard that she
had offered to the Maidan boy to take his wife to Europe with him, automatically he hated her since he hated
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all that she did. It seemed to him, at that time, that she could never be other than cruel even if, by accident,
an act hers were kind… Yes, it was a horrible situation.
But the cool breezes of the ocean seemed to clear up that hatred as if it had been a curtain. They
seemed to give him back admiration for her, and respect. (p. 162)
7- And now, I suppose, I must give you Leonora’s side of the case…
That is very difficult. For Leonora, if she preserved an unchanged front, changed very frequently her
point of view. (p. 162)
PART IV
1.
1. I have, I am aware, told this story in a very rambling way so that it may be difficult for anyone to find their
path through what may be a sort of maze. I cannot help it. It have stuck to my idea of being in a country
cottage with a silent listener, hearing between the gusts of the wind and amidst the noises of the distant sea,
the story as it comes. And when one discusses an affair – a long, sad affair – one goes back, one goes
forward. One remembers points that one has forgotten and one explains them all the more minutely since one
recognizes that one has forgotten to mention them in their proper places and that one may have given, by
omitting them, a false impression. I console myself with thinking that this is a real story and that, after all,
real stories re probably told best in the way a person telling a story would tell them. They will then seem
most real. (p. 167)
2- At any rate, I think I have brought my story up to the date of Maisie Maidan’s death. I mean that I
have explained everything that went before it from the several points of view that were necessary – from
Leonora’s, from Edward’s and, to some extent, from my own. You have the facts for the trouble of finding
them; you have the points of view as far as I could ascertain them. (p. 167)
3- Let me imagine myself back, then, as the day of Maisie’s death – or rather at the moment of Florence’s
dissertation on the Protest, up in the old Castle of the town of M –. Let us consider Leonora’s point of view
with regard to Florence; Edward’s, of course, I cannot give you, for Edward naturally never spoke of his
affair with my wife. (I may, in what follows, be a little hard on Florence; but you must remember that I have
been writing away at this story now for six months and reflecting longer upon these affairs). (pp. 167-168)
4- She saw life as a perpetual sex-battle between husbands who desire to be unfaithful to their wives,
and wives who desire to recapture their husbands in the end. That was her sad and modest view of
matrimony. Man, for her, was a sort of brute who must have his divagations, his moments of excess, his
nights out, his, let us say, rutting seasons. (p. 169)
5- With the answering gaze of Edward into Florence’s blue and uplifted eyes, she knew that it had all
gone. She knew that that gaze meant that those two had had long conversations of an intimate kind – about
their likes and dislikes, about their natures, about their views of marriage. […] But, having watched Edward
all her life, she knew that that lying on of hands, that answering of gaze with gaze, meant that thing was
unavoidable. Edward was such a serious person.
She knew that any attempt on her part to separate those two would be to rivet in Edward an
irrevocable passion; that, as I have before told you, it was a trick of Edward’s nature to believe that the
seducing of a woman gave her an irrevocable hold over him for life. (pp. 172-173)
6- […] She waited outside Florence’s door and met Edward as he came away. She said nothing and he only
grunted. But I guess he had had a bad time.
Yes, the mental deterioration that Florence worked in Leonora was extraordinary; it smashed up her
whole life and all her chances. It made her, in the first place, hopeless – for she could not see how, after that,
Edward could return to her – after a vulgar intrigue with a vulgar woman. (p. 174)
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7- I guess that made him cut his throat. He might have stuck it out otherwise – but the thought that he had
lost Nancy and that, in addition, there was nothing left for him but a dreary, dreary succession of days in
which he could be of no public service… Well, it finished him. (p. 177)
2.
1- Anyhow, we had a stiff set of arguments up at the Hurlbird mansion which stands on a bluff over
the town. It may strike you, silent listener, as being funny if you happen to be European. But moral problems
of that description and the giving of millions to institutions are immensely serious matters in my country.
Indeed, they are the staple topics for consideration among the wealthy classes. We haven’t peerage and
social climbing to occupy us much, and decent people do not take interest in politics or elderly people in
sport.. So that there were real tears shed by both Miss Hurlbird and Miss Florence before I left the city. (p.
181)
2- I was aware, at that date, that her niece had been seduced by that fellow Jimmy before I had married her –
but I contrived to produce on her the impression that I thought Florence had been a model wife. Why, at that
date I still believed that Florence had been perfectly virtuous after her marriage to me. I had not figured out
that she could have played it so low down as to continue her intrigue with that fellow under my roof. Well, I
was a fool. But I did not think much about Florence at that date. My mind was occupied with what was
happening at Branshaw. (p. 181)
3- What had happened was just Hell. Leonora had spoken to Nancy; Nancy had spoken to Edward;
Edward had spoken to Leonora – and they had talked and talked. And talked. You have to imagine horrible
pictures of gloom and half lights, and emotions running through silent nights – through whole nights. You
have to imagine my beautiful Nancy appearing suddenly to Edward, rising up at the foot of his bed, with her
long hair falling, like split cone of shadow, in the glimmer of a night-light that burned beside him. You have
to imagine her, a silent, a no doubt agonized figure, like a spectre, suddently offering herself to him – to save
his reason! And you have to imagine his frantic refusal – and talk. And talk! My God! (p. 182)
4- […] to me who was hourly with them they appeared like tender, ordered and devoted people, smiling,
absenting themselves at the proper intervals; driving me to meets – just good people! How the devil – how
the devil do they do it?
5- […] But I thought that that was only English manners – some sort of delicacy that I had not got the hang
of. You must remember that at that moment I trusted in Edward and Leonora and in Nancy Rufford, and in
the tranquillity of ancient haunts of peace, as I had trusted in my mother’s love. And that evening Edward
spoke to me. (p. 183)
6- And the human heart is a very mysterious thing. It is impossible to say that Leonora, in acting as she then
did, was not filled with a sort of hatred of Edward’s final virtue. She wanted, I think, to despise him. He was,
she realized, gone form her for good. Then let him suffer, let him agonize; let him, if possible, break and go
to that Hell that is the abode of broken resolves. (p. 184)
7- Well, she laid there the offer of her virtue – and her reason. Those were sufficient instalments of her life.
It would today be much better for Nancy Ruffors if she were dead.
Perhaps all these reflections are a nuisance; but they crowd on me. I will try to tell the story. (p. 187)
8- And that night, by a merciless trick of the devil that pays attention to this sweltering hell of ours,
Nancy Rufford had a letter from her mather. It came whilst Leonora was talking to Edward, or Leonora
would have intercepted it as she had intercepted others. It was an amazing and a ahorrible letter…
I don’t know what it contained. I just average out from its effects on Nancy that her mother, having
eloped with some worthless sort of fellow, had done what is called ‘sinking lower and lower’ (pp. 190-191)
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9- And at the same time, Leonora was lashing, like a cold fiend, into the unfortunate Edward. Or,
perhaps, he was not so unfortunate; because he had done what he knew to be the right thing, he may be
deemed happy. I leave it to you. […]
I like to think that, uppermost in it was concern and horror at the thought of the poor girl’s going
back to a father whose voice made her shriek in the night. And, indeed, that motive was very strong with
Leonora. But I think there was also present the thought that she wanted to go on torturing Edward with the
girl’s presence. She was, at that time, capable of that. (p. 191)
10- Heaven knows what happened in Leonora after that. She certainly does not herself know. She
probably said a good deal more to Edward than I have been able to report; but that is all that she has told me
and I am not going to make up speeches. To follow her psychological development of that moment I think
we must allow that she upbraided him for a great deal of their past life, whilst Edward sat absolutely silent.
And indeed, in speaking of it afterwards, she has said several times: ‘I said a great dela more to him than I
wanted to, just because he was so silent.’ She talked, in fact, in the endeavour to sting him into speech. (p.
192)
11- [..] ‘We’re no good – my mother an I.’
‘No. No. You’re not no good. It’s I that am no good. You can’t let that man go on to ruin for want of you.
You must belong to him.’
The girl, she said, smiled at her with a queer, far-away smile – as if she were a thousand years old, as
if Leonora were a tiny child.
‘I knew you would come to that,’ she said, very slowly. ‘But we are not worth it – Edward and I.’ (p.
195)
3.
1- You are to remember that all this happened a month before Leonora went into the girl’s room at
night. I have been casting back again; but I cannot help it. It is so difficult to keep all these people going. I
tell you about Leonora and bring her up to date; then about Edward, who has fallen behind. And then the girl
gets hopelessly left behind. I wish I could put it down in diary form. Thus: On the 1st September they
returned to Nauheim. Leonora at once took her bed. By the 1st of October they were all going to to meets
together. Nancy had already observed very fully that Edward was strange in his manner. About the 6th of that
month Edward gave the horse to young Selmes, and Nancy had cause to believe that her aunt did not love her
uncle. On the 20th she read the account of the divorce cas, which is reported in the papers of the 18th and the
two folowing days. On the 23rd she read the conversation with her aunt in the hall – about marriage in
general and about her possible marriage. Her aunt’s coming to her bedroom did not occur until the 12 th of
November.
Thus she had three weeks for introspection – for introspection beneath gloomy skies, in that old
house, rendered darker by the fact that it lay in a hollow crowned by fir trees with their black shadows. (pp.
200-201)
4.
1- It appeared to her that it was Leonora’s business to save her husband’s body; she, Nancy, possessed his
soul – a precious thing that she would shield and bear away up in her arms – as if Leonora were a hungry
dog, trying to spring up at a lamb that she was carrying. Yes, she felt as if Edward’s love were a precious
lamb that she were bearing away from a cruel and predatory beast. For, at that time, Leonora appeared to her
as a cruel and predatory beast. Leonora, Leonora with her hunger, with her cruelty had driven Edward to
madness. He must be sheltered by his love for her and by her love […] (p. 206)
2- […] it was the price that the girl must pay for the sin of having made Edward love her, for the sin of
loving her husband. She talked on and on, beside the fire. The girl must become an adulteress; she had
wronged Edward by being so beautiful, so gracious, so good. It was sinful to be so good. She must pay the
price so as to save the man she had wronged. (p. 208)
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3- ‘Oh, my poor dear; oh, my poor dear.’ And they sat, crouching together in each other’s arms, and crying
and crying; and they lay down in the same bed, talking and talking, all through the night. And all through the
night Edward could hear their voices through the wall. That was how it went… (p. 208)
5.
1- It is this part of the story that makes me saddest of all. For I ask myself unceasingly, my mind going round
and round in a weary, baffled space of pain – what should these people have done? What, in the name of
God, should they have done?
The end was perfectly plain to each of them – it was perfectly manifest ta this stage that, if the girl
did not, in Leonora’s phrase, ‘belong to Edward,’ Edward must die, the girl must lose her reason because
Edward died – and, that after a time, Leonora, who was the coldest and the strongest of the three, would
console herself by marrying Rodney Bayham and have a quiet, comfortable good time. That end, on that
night, whilst Leonora sat in the girl’s bedroom and Edward telephoned down below – that end was plainly
manifest. The girl, plainly, was half-mad already; Edward was half-dead; only Leonora, active, persistent,
instinct with her cold passion of energy, was ‘doing things’. What then, should they have done? It worked
out in the extinction of two very splendid personality – for Edward and the girl were splendid personality, in
order that a third personality, more normal, should have, after a long period of trouble, a quiet, comfortable,
good time. (p. 210)
2- I am writing this, now, I should say, a full eighteen months after the words that end my last
chapter. Since witing the words ‘until my arrival’, which I see end that paragraph, I have seen again for a
glimpse, from a swift train, beaucaire with the beautiful white tower, Tarascon with the sqaure castle, the
great Rhone, the immense stretches of the Crau. I have rushed through all Provence – and all Provence no
longer matters. It is no longer in the olive hills that I shall find my Heaven; because there is only Hell… (p.
210)
3- Edward is dead; the girl is gone – oh, utterly gone; Leonora is having a good time with Rodney
Bayham, and I sit alone in Branshaw Teleragh. I have been through Provence; I have seen Africa; I have
visited Asia to see, in Ceylon, in a darkened room, my poor girl, sitting motionless, with her wonderful hair
about her, looking at me with eyes that did not see me, and saying distinctly: ‘Credo in unum Deum
omnipotentem… Credo in unum Deum omnipotentem’. Those are the only reasonable words she uttered;
those are the only words, it appears, that she ever will utter. I suppose that they are reasonable words; it must
be extraordinarily reasonable for her, if she can say that she believes in an Omnipotent Deity. Well, there it
is. I am very tired of it all… (p. 210)
4- I seem to have lost all sense of the pathetic; but still, that simple, enormous request of the old
colonel strikes me as pathetic. He was cursed by his atrocious temper; he had been cursed by a half-mad
wife, who drank and went on the streets. His daughter was totally mad – and yet he believed in the goodness
of human nature. He believed that Leonora would take the trouble to go all the way to Ceyolon in order to
soothe his daughter. Leonora wouldn’t. Leonora didn’t ever want to see Nancy again. (p. 211)
5- […] Of course they [the sea air, the change of climate, the voyage] haven’t restored her reason. She is, I
am aware, sitting in the hall, forty paces from where I am now writing. I don’t want to be in the least
romantic about it. She is very well dressed; she is quite quiet; she is very beautiful. The old nurse looks after
her very efficiently. (212)
6- So here I am very much where I started thirteen years ago. I am the attendant, not the husband, of a
beautiful girl, who pays no attention to me. I am estranged from Leonora, who married Rodney Bayham in
my absence and went to live at Bayham. Leonora rather dislikes me, because she has got it into her head that
I disapprove of her marriage with Rodney Bayham. Well, I disapprove of her marriage. Possibly I am
jealous. (p. 212)
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7- Yes, no doubt I am jealous. In my fainter sort of way I seem to perceive myself following the lines
of Edward Ashburnham. I suppose that I should really like to be a polygamist; with Nancy, and with
Leonora, and with Maisie Maidan and possibly even with Florence. I am no doubt like every other man-,
only, probably because of my American origin I am fainter. At the same time I am able to assure you that I
am a strictly respectable person. I have never done anything that the most anxious mother of a daughter or
the most careful dean of a cathedral would object to. I have only followed, faintly, and in my unconscious
desires, Edward Ashburnham. (p. 213)
8- Well, it is all over. Not one of us has got what he really wanted. Leonora wanted Edward, and she has got
Rodney Bayham, pleasant enough sort of sheep. Florence wanted Branshaw, and it is who have bought it
from Leonora. I didn’t really want it; what I wanted mostly was to cease being a nurse-attendant. Well, I am
a nurse-attendant. Edward wanted Nancy Rufford, and I have got her. Only she is mad. It is a queer and
fantastic world. Why can’t people have what they want? The things were all there to content everybody; yet
everybody has the wrong thing. Perhaps you can make head or tail of it; it is beyond me. (p. 213)
9- Is there any terrestrial paradise where, amidst the whispering of the olive-leaves, people can be with
whom they like and have what they like and take their ease in shadows and in coolness? Or are all men’s
lives like the lives of us good people – like the lives of the Ashburnhams, of the Dowells, of the Ruffords –
broken, tumultuous, agonized, and unromantic lives, periods punctuated by screams, by imbecilities, by
deaths, by agonies? Who the delvil knows? (p. 213)
10- […] the conventional line; it was in tune with the tradition of Edward’s house. I daresay it worked out for
the greatest good of the body politic. Conventions and traditions, I suppose, work blindly but surely for the
preservation of the normal type; for the extinction of proud, resolute and unusual individuals. (p. 214)
11- Edward was the normal man, but there was too much of the sentimental about him; and society does not
need too many sentimentalists. Nancy was a splendid creature, but she had about her a touch of madness.
Society does not need individuals with touches of madness about them. So Edward and Nancy found
themselves steamrolled out and Leonora survives, the perfectly normal type, married to a man who is rather
like a rabbit. For Rodney Bayham is rather like a rabbit; and I hear that Leonora is expected to have a baby in
three months’ time. (p. 214)
12- All the world was mad around her and she herself, agonized, took on the complexion of a mad woman;
of a woman very wicked; of the villain of the piece. What would you have? Steel is a normal, hard, polished
substance. But, if you put it in a hot fire it will become red, soft, and not to be handled. If you put it in a fire
still more hot it will drip away. It was like that with Leonora. She was made for normal circumstances – […]
(p. 215)
6.
1- Having discovered what he wanted – that the girl should go five thousand miles away and love him
steadfastly as people do in sentimental novels, she was determined to smash that aspiration. And she
repeated to Edward in every possible tome that the girl did not love him; that the girl detested him for his
brutality, his overbearingness, his drinking habits. She pointed out that Edward in the girl’s eyes, was already
pledged three or four deep. He was pledged to Leonora herself, to Mrs Basil, and to the memories of Maisie
Maidan and to Florence. Edward never said anything.
Did the girl love Edward, or didn’t she? I don’t know. (p. 218)
2- I don’t attach any particular importance to these generalizations of mine. They may be right, they may be
wrong; I am only an ageing American with very little knowledge of life. You may take my generalizations or
leave them. But I am pretty certain that I am right in the case of Nancy Rufford – that she had loved Edward
Ashburnham very deeply and tenderly. […]
Anyhow, I don’t know whether, at this point, Nancy Rufford loved Edward Ashburnham. I don’t
know whether she even loved him when, on getting, at Aden, the news of his suicide she went mad. Because
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that may just as well have been for the sake of Leonora as for the sake fo Edward. Or it may have been for
the sake of both of them. I don’t know. I know nothing. I am very tired. (pp. 219-220)
3- Leonora held passionately the doctrine that the girl didn’t love Edward. She wanted desperately
to believe that. It was a doctrine as necessary to her existence as a belief in the personal immortality of the
soul. She said that it was impossible that Nancy could have loved Edward after she had given the girl her
view of Edward’s career and character. Edward, on the other hand, believe maunderingly that some essential
attractiveness in himself must have made the girl continue to go on loving him – to go on loving him, as it
were, in underneath her official aspect of hatred. He thought she only pretended to hate him in order to save
her face and he thought that her quite atrocious telegram from Brindisi was only another attempt to do that –
to prove that she had feelings creditable to a member of the feminine commonweal. I don’t know. I leave it
to you. (p. 220)
4- There is another part that worries me a good deal in the aspects of this sad affair. Leonora says
that, in desiring that the girl should go five thousand miles away and yet continue to love him, Edward was a
monster of selfishness. He was desiring the ruin of a young life. Edward on the other hand put it to me that,
supposing that the girl’s love was a necessity to his existence, and, if he did nothing by owrd or by action to
keep Nancy’s love alive, he couldn’t be called selfish. Leonora replied that showed he had an abominably
selfish nature even though his actions might be perfectly correct. I can’t make out which of them was right. I
leave it to you. (p. 220)
5- And there it is also that all those three presented to the world the spectacle of being the best of good
people. I assure you that during my stay for that fortnight in that fine old house, I never so much as noticed a
single thing that could have affected that good opinion. And even when I look back, knowing the
circumstances, I can’t remember a single thing any of them said that could have betrayed them. I can’t
remember, right up to the dinner, when Leonora read out that telegram – not the tremor of an eyelash, not the
shaking of a hand. It was just a pleasant country houseparty.
And Leonora kept it up jolly well, for even longer than that – she kept it up as far as I was concerned
until eight days after Edward’s funeral. (p. 221)
6- It is queer the fantastic things that quite good people will do in order to keep up their appearance
of calm pococurantism. For Edward Ashburnham and his wife called me half the world over in order to sit
oin the back seat of a dog-cart whilst Edward drove the girl to the railway station from which she was to take
her deaprture to India. They wanted, I suppose, to have a witness of the calmness of that function. […] It was
a most amazing business, and I think that it would have been better in the eyes of God if they had all
attempted to gouge at each other’s eyes with carving knives. But they were ‘good people’. (p. 223)
7- He swung round on his heel and, large, slouching, and walking with a heavy deliberate pace, he
went out of the station. I followed him and got up beside him in the high dog-cart. It was the most horrible
performance I had ever seen. (p. 225)
8- Well, that is the end of the story. And, when I come to look at it I see that it is a happy ending
with wedding bells and all. The villains – for obviously Edward and the girl were villains – have been
punished by suicide and madness.The heroine – the perfectly normal, virtuous and slightly deceitful heroine
– has become the happy wife of a perfectly normal, virtuous and slightly deceitful husband. She will shortly
become a mother of a perfectly normal, virtuous and slightly deceitful son or daughter. A happy ending, that
is what it works out at. (pp. 225-226)
9- Society must go on, I suppose, and society can only exist if the normal, if the virtuous, and the slightly
deceitful flourish, and if the passionate, the headstrong, and the too-truthful are condemned to suicide and
madness. (p. 277)
10- But I guess that I myself, in my fainter way, come into the category of the passionate, of the headstrong,
and the too-truthful. For I can’t conceal from myself the fact that I loved Edward Ashburnham – and that I
love him because he was just myself. If I had had the courage and virility and possibly also the physique of
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Edward Ashburnham I should, I fancy, have done much what he did. He seems to me like a large elder
brother who took me out on several excursions and did many dashing things whilst I just watched him
robbing the orchards, from a distance. And, you see, I am just as much of a sentimentalist as he was… (p.
227)
11- Yes, society must go on; it must breed, like rabbits. That is what we are here for. But then, I don’t like
society – much. I am that absurd figure, an American millionaire, who has bought one of the ancient haunts
of English peace. I sit here, in Edward’s gun-room, all day and all day in a house that is absolutely quiet. No
one visits me, for I visit no one. No one is interested in me, for I have no interests. (p. 227)
12- But at any rate, there is always Leonora to cheer you up; I don’t want to sadden you. Her
husband is quite an economical person of so normal a figure that he can get quite a large proportion of his
clothes ready-made. That is the great desideratum of life, and that is the end of my story. The child is to be
brought up as a Romanist. (p. 228)
13- It suddenly occurs to me that I have forgotten to say how Edward met his death. You remember
that peace had descended upon the house. (p. 228)
14- Well, Edward was the English gentleman; but he was also, to the last, a sentimentalist, whose
mind was compounded of indifferent poems and novels. He just looked up to the roof of the stable, as if he
were looking to Heaven, and whispered something that I did not catch.
[…]
I guess he could see in my eyes that I didn’t intend to hinder him. Why should I hinder him?
[…]
When he saw that I did not intend to interfere with him his eyes became soft and almost affectionate.
He remarked:
‘So long, old man, I must have a but of a rest, you know.’
I didn’t know what to say. I wanted to say, ‘God bless you,’ for I also am a sentimentalist. But I
thought that perhaps that would not be quite English form, so I trotted off with the telegram to Leonora. She
was quite pleased with it. (p. 229)
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T.S. ELIOT – poetica
1) Il correlativo oggettivo (da “Hamlet and His Problems”1919, in The Sacred Wood, 1920):
[…] Shakespeare’s Hamlet […] is a play dealing with the effect of a mother’s guilt upon her son, and […]
Shakespeare was unable to impose his motive successfully upon the ‘intractable’ material of the play. […]
the play is most certainly a failure. […] It is the ‘Mona Lisa’ of literature.
The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an ‘objective correlative’; in other
words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion;
such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is
immediately evoked.
The artistic ‘inevitability’ lies in this complete adequacy of the external to the emotion; and this is precisely
what is deficient in Hamlet. Hamlet (the man) is dominated by an emotion which is inexpressible, because it
is in excess of the facts as they appear.
2) Il senso storico (da “Tradition and the Individual Talent”, in The Sacred Wood, 1920):
Tradition […] cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour. It involves, in the
first place, the historical sense […] and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of
the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation
in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from homer and within it the whole
of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. This
historical sense […] is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most
acutely conscious of his place in time, of his contemporaneity.
[…]
The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the
new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives;
for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly
altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this
is conformity between the old and the new. Whoever has approved this idea of order, of the form of
European, of English literature, will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as
much as the present is directed by the past.
3) Il concetto di impersonalità (da “Tradition and the Individual Talent”, in The Sacred Wood, 1920):
What is to be insisted upon is that the poet must develop or procure a consciousness of the past and that he
should continue to develop this consciousness throughout his career. What happens is a continual surrender
of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a
continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality. […] It is in this depersonalization that art may
be said to approach the condition of science.
[…] the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the
mind which creates.
The poet’s mind is in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which
remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together.
[…] The business of the poet is not find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up
into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all. All emotions which he has never
experienced will serve his turn as well as those familiar to him. Consequently, we must believe that “emotion
recollected in tranquillity” is an inexact formula. […] Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape
from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only
those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things. […] But
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every few know when there is expression of significant emotion, emotion which has its life in the poem and
not in the history of the poet. The emotion of art is impersonal.
T.S. ELIOT – da Prufrock and Other Observations (1917)
Per Jean Verdenal,1889-1915
Mort aux Dardanelles
“Or puoi la quantitate
Comprender dell’amor che a te mi scalda,
quando dismento nostra vanitate,
trattando l’ombre come cosa salda”
Dante, Purg. XXI, 133-136
T.S. Eliot – da Prufrock and Other Observations (1917)
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
S'io credesse che mia risposta fosse
A persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
Questa fiamma staria senza più scosse.
Ma perciocché giammai di questo fondo
Non torno vivo alcun, s'i'odo il vero,
Senza tema d'infamia ti rispondo.
(Dante, Inferno, Canto XXVII)
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question ...
Oh, do not ask, "What is it?"
Let us go and make our visit.
13
14
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
15
16
17
18
19
20
The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes,
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
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21
22
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.
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36
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
And indeed there will be time
To wonder, "Do I dare?" and, "Do I dare?"
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair-(They will say: "How his hair is growing thin!")
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin-(They will say: "But how his arms and legs are thin!")
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
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50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
For I have known them all already, known them all:
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?
And I have known the eyes already, known them all-The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
And how should I presume?
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63
64
65
66
67
68
69
And I have known the arms already, known them all-Arms that are braceleted and white and bare
(But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!)
Is it perfume from a dress
That makes me so digress?
Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.
And should I then presume?
And how should I begin?
*
*
*
*
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106
70
71
72
Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows? ...
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I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.
*
*
*
*
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76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!
Smoothed by long fingers,
Asleep ... tired ... or it malingers,
Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?
But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter,
I am no prophet--and here’s no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.
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89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it toward some overwhelming question,
To say: "I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all"-If one, settling a pillow by her head,
Should say: "That is not what I meant at all;
That is not it, at all."
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100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
And would it have been worth it, after all,
Would it have been worth while,
After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,
After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor-And this, and so much more?-It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:
Would it have been worth while
If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,
And turning toward the window, should say:
"That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant, at all."
*
111
112
113
114
115
*
*
*
No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
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116
117
118
119
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous-Almost, at times, the Fool.
120
121
I grow old ... I grow old ...
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
122
123
124
Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
125
I do not think that they will sing to me.
126
127
128
129
130
131
I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
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VIRGINIA WOOLF – poetica
1) Da “Modern Fiction” (1919):
Look within and life, it seems, is very far from being ‘like this’. Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on
an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions – trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with
the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall,
as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from the old; the
moment of importance came not here but there; so that, if a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he
could write what he chose, not what he must, if he could base his work upon his own feeling and not upon
convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted
style, and perhaps not a single button sewn on as the Bond Street tailors would have it. Life is not a series of
gig-lamps symmetrically arranged (gig-lamps were the lamps in front of horse-drawn carriages, carefully
illuminating a small and circumscribed portion of the road ahead); Life is a luminous halo, a semitransparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. It is not the task of the
novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity
it may display, with as little mixture of the alien and external as possible? (p. 108)
Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern,
however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the
consciousness. Let us not take for granted that life exists more fully in what is commonly thought big than in
what is commonly thought small. (p. 109)
However this may be, the problem before the novelist at present, as we suppose it to have been in the past, is
to contrive means of being free to set down what he chooses. He has to have the courage to say that what
interests him is no longer ‘this’ but ‘that’: out of ‘that’ alone must he construct his work. For the moderns
‘that’, the point of interest, lies very likely in the dark places of psychology. (p. 110)
In questo saggio Woolf espone il principio di inclusività contrapposto a quello di selettività, tipico
quest’ultimo del romanzo ottocentesco:
The proper stuff of fiction does not exist; everything is the proper stuff of fiction, every feeling, every
thought; every quality of brain and spirit is drawn upon; no perception comes amiss. (p. 111)
2) Da “Mr Bennet e Mrs Brown” (1924):
…in or about December, 1910, human character changed… All human relations have shifted – those
between maters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children. And when human relations change
there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics, and literature. Let us agree to place these
changes about the year 1910. (p. 113)
At the present moment we are suffering, not from decay, but from having no code of manners which writrers
and readers accept as a prelude to the more exciting intercourse of friendship. The literary convention of the
time is so artificial – you have to talk about visit – that, naturally, the feeble are tempted to outrage, and the
strong are led to destroy the very foundations and rules of literary society. Signs of this are everywhere
apparent. Grammar is violated; syntax disintegrated… The more adult writers do not, of course, indulge in
such wanton exhibition of spleen… (p. 126)
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3) Da The Narrow Bridge of Art (1927): concetto di ‘romanzo cannibale’:
Nobody indeed can read much modern literature without being aware that some dissatisfaction, some
difficulty, is lying in our way… Many reasons might be given, but here let us select only one, and that is the
failure of poetry to serve us as it has served so many generations of our fathers… (p. 218)
… there was a form once, and it was not the form of lyric poetry; it was the form of the drama, of the poetic
drama of the Elizabethan age. And that is the one form which seems dead beyond all possibility of
resurrection today. (p. 219)
… In the modern mind beauty is not accompanied by its shadow but by its opposite. The modern poet talks
of the nightingale who sings ‘jug jug to dirty ears’. There trips along by the side of our modern beauty some
mocking spirit which sneers at beauty for being beautiful; which turns the looking-glass and shows us that
the other side of her cheek is pitted and deformed.
If, then, we are daring and risk ridicule and try to see in what direction we who seem to be moving so fast are
going, we may guess that we are going in the direction of prose and that in ten or fifteen years’ time prose
will be used for purposes for which prose has never been used before. That cannibal, the novel, which has
devoured so many forms of art will by then have devoured more… And it is possible that there will be
among the so-called novels one which we shall scarcely know how to christen. It will be written in prose, but
in prose which has many of the characteristics of poetry. It will have something of the exaltation of poetry,
but much of the ordinariness of prose. It will be dramatic, and yet not a play. It will be read, not acted. By
that name we are to call it is not matter of very great importance. What is important is that this book which
we see on the horizon may serve to express some of those feelings which seem at the moment to be balked
by poetry pure and simple and to find the drama equally hospitable to them. Let us try, then, to come to
closer terms with it and to imagine what may be its scope and nature.
In the first place, one may guess that it will differ from the novel as we know it now chiefly in that it will
stand further back form life. It will give, as poetry does, the outline rather than detail. It will make little use
of the marvellous fact-recording power, which is one of the attributes of fiction. It will tell us very little
about the houses, incomes, occupations of its characters; it will have little kinship with the sociological novel
or the novel of the environment. With these limitations it will express the feeling and ideas of the characters
closely and vividly, but from a different angle. It will resemble poetry in this that it will give not only or
mainly people’s relations to each other and their activities together, as the novel has hitherto done, but it will
give the relation of the mind to general ideas and its soliloquy in solitude. For under the dominion of the
novel we have scrutinized one part of the mind closely and left another unexplored. We have come to forget
that a large and important part of life consists in our emotions towards such things as roses and nightingales,
the dawn, the sunset, life, death, and fate; we forget that we spend much time sleeping, dreaming, thinking,
reading, alone; we are not entirely occupied in personal relations…
… It will give the relations of man to nature, to fate; his imagination; his dreams. But it will also give the
sneer, the contrast, the question, the closeness and complexity of life. It will take the mould of that queer
conglomeration of incongruous things – the modern mind.
… There [in Tristram Shandy di Sterne], one sees, is poetry changing easily and naturally into prose, prose
into poetry. Standing a little aloof, Sterne lays his hands lightly upon imagination, wit, fantasy; and reaching
high up among the branches where these things grow, naturally and no doubt willingly forfeits his right to
the more substantial vegetables that grow on the ground. For, unfortunately, it seems true that some
renunciation is inevitable. You cannot cross the narrow bridge of art carrying all its tools in your hands.
So, then, this unnamed variety of the novel will be written standing back from life, because in that way a
larger view is to be obtained of some important feature of it; it will be written in prose, because prose, if you
free it from the beast-of-burden work which so many novelists necessarily lay upon it, of carrying loads of
details, bushels of facts – prose thus treated will show itself capable of rising high from the ground, not in
one dart, but in sweeps and circles…
… There remains, however, a further question. Can prose be dramatic?… There it will be necessary for a
writer of this exacting book to bring to bear upon his tumultuous and contradictory emotions the generalizing
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effect and simplifying power of a strict and logical imagination. Tumult is vile; confusion is hateful;
everything in a work of art should be mastered and ordered. His effort will be to generalize and split up.
Instead of enumerating details he will mould blocks. His characters thus will have a dramatic power which
the minutely realized characters of contemporary fiction often sacrifice in the interests of psychology. And
then, though this is scarcely visible, so far distant it lies on the rim of the horizon – one can imagine that he
will have extended the scope of his interest so as to dramatize some of those influences which play so large a
part in life, yet have so far escaped the novelist – the power of music, the stimulus of sight, the effect on us
of the shape of trees or the play of colour, the emotions bred in us by crowds, the obscure terrors and hatreds
which come so irrationally in certain places or from certain people, the delight of movement, the intoxication
of wine. Every moment is the centre and meeting-place of an extraordinary number of perceptions which
have not yet been expressed. Life is always and inevitably much richer than we who try to express it. (pp.
228-29)
VIRGINIA WOOLF, da Mrs Dalloway (1925)
Intreccio:
I:
1) Clarissa esce per andare a comprare i fiori
2) Incontra Hugh
3) È nel negozio di fiori e sente lo sparo
II:
1) Il passaggio dell’automobile (ore 11)
2) Septimus non riesce ad attraversare la strada
3) L’aeroplano
4) Lucrezia e Septimus in Regent’s Park
III:
1) Clarissa torna a casa e trova il messaggio sul taccuino; comincia a rammendare l’abito per la sera
2) Arriva Peter: il dialogo tra i due (sono le 11.30)
IV: (sono le 11.30)
1) Peter esce dalla casa di Clarissa
2) Peter segue una donna
3) Va in Regent’s Park e si addormenta
V: (passano meno di 15 minuti)
1) (Il sonno di Peter)
2) (I ricordi di Peter)
VI:
1) Sono le 11.45: Peter viene scambiato da Septimus per Evans
2) Peter si allontana da Regent’s Park e sente il canto di una donna alla stazione della metropolitana, le dà
una moneta e prende un taxi
3) Rezia e Septimus si dirigono verso lo studio di Sir W. Bradshaw
VII: (dalle 12 alle 6)
1) Clarissa mette il vestito sul letto
2) Lucrezia e Septimus da Sir W. Bradshaw: prendono un appuntamento per le 6 p.m. ed escono in Harley
Street
3) Sono le 13.30: Hugh e Richard pranzano da Lady Bruton
4) Camminano per Mayfair e, poi, si separano
5) Richard compra dei fiori per Clarissa
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6) Torna a casa e trova Clarissa allo scrittoio
7) Sono le 3 p.m.: Richard va a una riunione mentre Clarissa va a riposarsi
8) Elizabeth e Miss Kilman vanno all’emporio
9) Poi: Miss Kilman va nella Westminster Abbey mentre Elizabeth prende un autobus e fa un giro per la City
10) Septimus dà consigli Rezia a proposito della confezione del cappello per la figlia di Miss Filmer
11) Arriva il Dr Holmes
12) Il suicidio di Septimus: sono le 6 p.m.
VIII:
1) Sono le 6 p.m. e Peter sente il suono dell’ambulanza
2) Torna in albergo e trova una lettera di Clarissa
3) Va a cena
4) Poi va nella sala da fumo con i Morris
5) Compra il giornale
6) Si incammina alla volta del party (Russell Square)
7) Arriva da Clarissa
IX:
1) Il party di Clarissa
2) Viene annunciata incidentalmente la morte di Septimus dalla Signora Bradshaw
3) Clarissa si ritira nel salottino
X:
1) Peter e Sally parlano sul divano mentre gli altri invitati se ne vanno
2) Entra Clarissa e Peter ha l’epifania.
CLARISSA E SEPTIMUS
1)
So, thought Septimus, looking up, they are signalling to me. Not indeed in actual words; that is, he could not
read the language yet; but it was plain enough, this beauty, this exquisite beauty, and tears filled his eyes as
he looked at the smoke words languishing and melting in the sky and bestowing upon him in their
inexhaustible charity and laughing goodness one shape after another of unimaginable beauty and signalling
their intention to provide him, for nothing, forever, for looking merely, with beauty, more beauty! Tears ran
down his cheeks.
2)
He had only to open his eyes; but a weight was on them; a fear. He strained; he pushed; he looked; he saw
Regent’s Park before him. Long streamers of sunlight fawned at his feet. The trees waved, brandished. We
welcome, the world seemed to say; we accept; we create. Beauty, the world seemed to say. And as if to
prove it (scientifically) wherever he looked at the houses, at the railings, at the antelopes stretching over the
palings, beauty sprang instantly. To watch a leaf quivering in the rush of air was an exquisite joy. Up in the
sky swallows swooping, swerving, flinging themselves in and out, round and round, yet always with perfect
control as if elastics held them; and the flies rising and falling; and the sun spotting now this leaf, now that,
in mockery, dazzling it with soft gold in pure good temper; and now and again some chime (it might be a
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motor horn) tinkling divinely on the grass stalks— all of this, calm and reasonable as it was, made out of
ordinary things as it was, was the truth now; beauty, that was the truth now. Beauty was everywhere.
3)
“My hand has grown so thin,” she said. “I have put it in my purse,” she told him.
He dropped her hand. Their marriage was over, he thought, with agony, with relief. The rope was cut; he
mounted; he was free, as it was decreed that he, Septimus, the lord of men, should be free; alone (since his
wife had thrown away her wedding ring; since she had left him), he, Septimus, was alone, called forth in
advance of the mass of men to hear the truth, to learn the meaning, which now at last, after all the toils of
civilisation—Greeks, Romans, Shakespeare, Darwin, and now himself—was to be given whole to. . . . “To
whom?” he asked aloud.
4)
And then this dress of hers—where was the tear? and now her needle to be threaded. This was a favourite
dress, one of Sally Parker’s, the last almost she ever made, alas, for Sally had now retired, living at Ealing,
and if ever I have a moment, thought Clarissa (but never would she have a moment any more), I shall go and
see her at Ealing. For she was a character, thought Clarissa, a real artist. She thought of little out-of-the-way
things; yet her dresses were never queer. You could wear them at Hatfield; at Buckingham Palace. She had
worn them at Hatfield; at Buckingham Palace.
5)
Millicent Bruton, whose lunch parties were said to be extraordinarily amusing, had not asked her. No vulgar
jealousy could separate her from Richard. But she feared time itself, and read on Lady Bruton’s face, as if it
had been a dial cut in impassive stone, the dwindling of life; how year by year her share was sliced; how
little the margin that remained was capable any longer of stretching, of absorbing, as in the youthful years,
the colours, salts, tones of existence, so that she filled the room she entered, and felt often as she stood
hesitating one moment on the threshold of her drawing-room, an exquisite suspense, such as might stay a
diver before plunging while the sea darkens and brightens beneath him, and the waves which threaten to
break, but only gently split their surface, roll and conceal and encrust as they just turn over the weeds with
pearl.
6)
And now Clarissa escorted her Prime Minister down the room, prancing, sparkling, with the stateliness of her
grey hair. She wore ear-rings, and a silver-green mermaid’s dress. Lolloping on the waves and braiding her
tresses she seemed, having that gift still; to be; to exist; to sum it all up in the moment as she passed; turned,
caught her scarf in some other woman’s dress, unhitched it, laughed, all with the most perfect ease and air of
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a creature floating in its element. But age had brushed her; even as a mermaid might behold in her glass the
setting sun on some very clear evening over the waves.
7)
[…] high on his rock, like a drowned sailor on a rock. I leant over the edge of the boat and fell down, he
thought. I went under the sea. I have been dead, and yet am now alive, but let me rest still; he begged (he was
talking to himself again—it was awful, awful!); and as, before waking, the voices of birds and the sound of
wheels chime and chatter in a queer harmony, grow louder and louder and the sleeper feels himself drawing
to the shores of life, so he felt himself drawing towards life, the sun growing hotter, cries sounding louder,
something tremendous about to happen.
8)
Quiet descended on her, calm, content, as her needle, drawing the silk smoothly to its gentle pause, collected
the green folds together and attached them, very lightly, to the belt. So on a summer’s day waves collect,
overbalance, and fall; collect and fall; and the whole world seems to be saying “that is all” more and more
ponderously, until even the heart in the body which lies in the sun on the beach says too, That is all. Fear no
more, says the heart. Fear no more, says the heart, committing its burden to some sea, which sighs
collectively for all sorrows, and renews, begins, collects, lets fall. And the body alone listens to the passing
bee; the wave breaking; the dog barking, far away barking and barking.
10)
Outside the trees dragged their leaves like nets through the depths of the air; the sound of water was in the
room and through the waves came the voices of birds singing. Every power poured its treasures on his head,
and his hand lay there on the back of the sofa, as he had seen his hand lie when he was bathing, floating, on
the top of the waves, while far away on shore he heard dogs barking and barking far away. Fear no more,
says the heart in the body; fear no more.
11)
It [the sky] held, foolish as the idea was, something of her own in it, this country sky, this sky above
Westminster. She parted the curtains; she looked. Oh, but how surprising!—in the room opposite the old lady
stared straight at her! She was going to bed. And the sky. It will be a solemn sky, she had thought, it will be a
dusky sky, turning away its cheek in beauty. But there it was—ashen pale, raced over quickly by tapering
vast clouds. It was new to her. The wind must have risen. She was going to bed, in the room opposite. It was
fascinating to watch her, moving about, that old lady, crossing the room, coming to the window. Could she
see her? It was fascinating, with people still laughing and shouting in the drawing-room, to watch that old
woman, quite quietly, going to bed. She pulled the blind now. The clock began striking. The young man had
killed himself; but she did not pity him; with the clock striking the hour, one, two, three, she did not pity
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him, with all this going on. There! the old lady had put out her light! the whole house was dark now with this
going on, she repeated, and the words came to her, Fear no more the heat of the sun. She must go back to
them. But what an extraordinary night! She felt somehow very like him—the young man who had killed
himself. She felt glad that he had done it; thrown it away. The clock was striking. The leaden circles
dissolved in the air. He made her feel the beauty; made her feel the fun. But she must go back. She must
assemble. She must find Sally and Peter. And she came in from the little room.
12)
What business had the Bradshaws to talk of death at her party? A young man had killed himself. And they
talked of it at her party— the Bradshaws, talked of death. He had killed himself—but how? Always her body
went through it first, when she was told, suddenly, of an accident; her dress flamed, her body burnt. He had
thrown himself from a window. Up had flashed the ground; through him, blundering, bruising, went the rusty
spikes. There he lay with a thud, thud, thud in his brain, and then a suffocation of blackness. So she saw it.
But why had he done it? And the Bradshaws talked of it at her party!
She had once thrown a shilling into the Serpentine, never anything more. But he had flung it away. They
went on living (she would have to go back; the rooms were still crowded; people kept on coming). They (all
day she had been thinking of Bourton, of Peter, of Sally), they would grow old. A thing there was that
mattered; a thing, wreathed about with chatter, defaced, obscured in her own life, let drop every day in
corruption, lies, chatter. This he had preserved. Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate;
people feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart;
rapture faded, one was alone. There was an embrace in death.
But this young man who had killed himself—had he plunged holding his treasure? “If it were now to die,
’twere now to be most happy,” she had said to herself once, coming down in white.
CLARISSA E SALLY
Sally Seton nella memoria di Clarissa: "She sat on the floor -- that was her first impression of Sally -- she sat
on the floor with her arms round her knees, smoking a cigarette... Who is that? And he had told her, and said
that Sally's parents did not get on... It was an extraordinary beauty of the kind she most admired, dark, largeeyed, with that quality which, since she hadn's got it herself, she always envied -- a sort of abandonment, as
if she say anything, do anything; a quality much commoner to foreigners than in Englishwomen. Sally
always said she had French blood in her veins, an ancestor had been with Marie Antoinette, had his head cut
off, left a ruby ring... Sally gave her William Morris... there they sat, hour after hour, talking in her bedroom
at the top of house, talking about life, how they were to reform the world" (pp. 42-3)
Sally vista da Peter: "He could see Sally Seton, like a child who has been in mischief, leaning forward,
rather flushed, wanting to talk, but afraid, and Clarissa did frighten people (She was Clarissa's greatest
friend, always about the place, an attractive creature, handsome, dark, with the reputation in those days of
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great daring, and he used to give her cigars, which she smoked in her bedroom, and she had either been
engaged to somebody or quarrelled with her family, and old Parry disliked them both equally, which was a
great bond)" (p. 77)
Sally vista da Clarissa: "The lustre had left her. Yet it was extraordinary to see her again, older, happier, less
lovely... She had the simple egotism, the most open desire to be thought first always, and Clarissa loved her
for being still like that" (p. 225)
Sally vista da Clarissa: "But her voice was wrung of its old ravishing richness; her eyes not aglow as they
used to be, when she smoke cigars, when she ran down the passage to fetch her sponge bag withouta stitch of
clothing on her, and Ellen Atkins asked, What if the gentlemen had met her? But everybody forgave her..."
(p. 237)
Sally vista da Peter: "Lord, lord, what a change had come over her! the softness of motherhood: its egotism
too" (p. 245)
Sezione 1:
1) Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.
For Lucy had her work cut out for her. The doors would be taken off their hinges; Rumpelmayer’s men were
coming. And then, thought Clarissa Dalloway, what a morning – fresh as if issued to children on a beach.
What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed to her when, with a little squeak of the hinges,
which she could hear now, she had burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air.
How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the
kiss of a wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen as she then was) solemn, feeling as she did,
standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen; looking at the flowers, at the
trees with the smoke winding off them and the rooks rising, falling; standing and looking until Peter Walsh
said, ‘Musing among the vegetables? – was that is? – ‘I prefer men to cauliflowers’ – was that it? He must
have said it at breakfast one morning when she had gone out on to the terrace – Peter Walsh. He would be
back from India one of these days, June or July, she forgot which, for his letters were awfully dull; it was his
saying one remembered; his eyes, his pocket-knife, his smile, his grumpiness and, when millions of things
had utterly vanished – how strange it was! – a few sayings like this about cabbages.
2) There! Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in
the air. Such fools we are, she thought, crossing Victoria Street. For Heaven only knows why one loves it so,
how one sees it so, making up, building it round one, tumbling it, creating it every moment afresh; but the
variest frumps, the most dejected of miseries sitting on doorsteps (drink their downfall) do the same; can’t
be dealt with, she felt positive, by Acts of Parliament for that very reason: they love life. In people’s eyes, in
the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar, the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans,
sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands, barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the
strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London, this moment of June.
For it was the middle of June. The War was over, …
3) For they might be parted for hundreds of years, she and Peter; she never wrote a letter and his were dry
sticks; but suddenly it would come over her, if he were with me now what would he say? – some days, some
sights bringing him back to her calmly, without the old bitterness; which perhaps was the reward of having
cared for people; they came back in the middle of St James’s Park on a fine morning – indeed they did. But
Peter – however beautiful the day might be, and the trees and the grass, and the little girl in pink – Peter
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never saw a thing of all that. He would put on his spectacles, if she told him to; he would look. It was the
state of the world that interested him; Wagner, Pope’s poetry, people’s characters eternally, and the defects
of her own soul. How he scolded her! How they argued! She would marry a Prime Minister and stand at the
top of a staircase; the perfect hostess he called her (she had cried over it in her bedroom), she had the
makings of the perfect hostess, she said.
So she would still find herself arguing in St James’s Park, still making out that she had been right – and she
had too – not to marry him. For in marriage a little licence, a little independence there must be between
people living together day in day out in the same hose; which Richard gave her, and she him. (Where was he
this morning, for instance? Some committee, she never asked what.) But with Peter everything had to be
shared; evrything gone into. And it was intolerable, and when it came to that scene in the little garden by the
fountain, she had to break with him or they would have been destroyed, both of them ruined, she was
convinced; though she had borne about her for years like an arrow sticking in her heart the grief, the anguish:
and then the horror of the moment when someone told her at a concert that he had married a woman met on
the boat going to India! Never should she forget all that. Cold, heartless, a prude, he called her. Never could
she understand how he cared. But those Indian women did presumably – silly, pretty, flimsy, nincompoops.
And she wasted her pity. For he was quite happy, he assured her – perfectly happy, though he had never done
a thing that they had talked of; his whole life had been a failure. It made her angry still.
4) She felt very young; at the same time unspeakably aged. She sliced like a knife through everything; at the
same time was outside, looking on. She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxicabs, of being out, out,
far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day. Not
that she thought herself clever, or much out of the ordinary. How she got through life on the few twigs of
knowledge Fräulein Daniels gave them she could not think. She knew nothing; no language, no history; she
scarcely read a book now, except memoirs in bed; and yet to her it was absolutely absorbing; all this; the
cabs passing; and she would not say of Peter, she would not say of herself, I am this, I am that.
5) Did it matter then, she asked herself, walking towards Bond Street, did it matter that she must inevitably
cease completely; all this must go on without her; did she resent it; or did it not become consoling to believe
that death ended absolutely? But somehow in the streets of London, on the ebb and flow of things, here,
there, she survived, Peter survived, lived in each other, she being part, she was positive, of the trees at home;
of the house there, ugly, rambling all to bits and pieces as it was; part of people she had never met; being laid
out like a mist between the people she knew best, who lifted her on their branches as she had seen the trees
lift the mist, but it spread ever so far, her life, herself. But what was she dreaming as she looked into
Hatchards’ shop window? What was she trying to recover? What image of white dawn in the country, as she
read in the book spread open:
Fear no more the heat o’the sun
Nor the furious winter’s rages.
This late age of world’s experience had bred in them all, all men and women, a well of tears. Tears and
sorrows; courage and endurance; a perfectly upright and stoical bearing. Think, for example, of the woman
she admired most, Lady Bexborough, opening the bazaar.
6) She would have been, in the first place, dark like Lady Bexborough, with a skin of crumpled leather and
beautiful eyes. She would have been, like Lady Bexborough, slow and stately; rather large; interested in
politics like a man; with a country house; very dignified, very sincere. Instead of which she had a narrow
pea-stick figure; a ridiculous little face, beaked like a bird’s. That she held herself well was true; and had
nice hands and feet; and dressed well, considering that she spent little. But often now this body she wore (she
stopped to look at a Dutch picture), this body, with all its capacities, seemed nothing – nothing at all. She had
the oddest sense of being herself invisible; unseen; unknown; there being no more marrying, no more having
of children now, but only this astonishing and rather solemn progress with the rest of them, up Bond Street,
this being Mrs Richard Dalloway.
7) And as she began to go with Miss Pym from jar to jar, choosing, nonsense, nonsense, she said to herself,
more and more gently, as if this beauty, this scene, this colour, and Miss Pym liking her, trusting her, were a
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wave which she felt flow over her and surmount that hatred, that monster, surmount it all; and it lifted her up
and up when – oh! a pistol shot in the street outside!
‘Dear, those motor cars,’ said Miss Pym, going to the window to look, and coming back and smiling
apologetically with her hands full of sweet peas, as if those motor cars, those tyres of motor cars, were all her
fault.
Sezione 2:
8) Septimus Warren Smith, aged about thirty, pale-faced, beak-nosed, wearing brown shoes and a shabby
overcoat, with hazel eyes which had that look of apprehension in them which makes complete strangers
apprehensive too. The world has raised its whip; where it will descend?
9) And there the motor car stood, with drawn blinds, and upon them a curious pattern like a tree, Septimus
thought, and this gradual drawing together of everything to one centre before his eyes as if some horror had
come almost to the surface and was about to burst into flames, terrified him. The world wavered and
quivered and threatened to burst into flames. It is I who am blocking the way, he thought. Was he not being
looked at and pointed at; was he not weighed there, rooted to the oavement, for a purpose? But for what
purpose?
… People must notice; people must see. People, she [Rezia] thought, looking at the crowd staring at the
motor car; the English people, with their children and their horses and their clothes, which she admired in a
way; but they were ‘people’ now, because Septimus had said, I will kill myself’; and awful thing to say.
Suppose they had heard him? She looked at the crowd. Help, help! She wanted to cry out to butchers’ boys
and women. Help! Only last autumn she and Septimus had stood on the Embankment wrapped in the same
cloak and, Septimus reading a paper instead of talking, she had snatched it from him and laughed in the old
man’s face who saw them! But failure one conceals. She must take him away into some park.
10) The sound of an aeroplane bored ominously into the ears of the crowd. There it was coming over the
trees, letting out white smoke from behind, which curled and twisted, actually writing something! Making
letters in the sky! Everyone looked up…
… ‘Kreemo,’ murmured Mrs Bletchley, like a sleep-walker. With his hat held out perfectly still in his hand,
Mr Bowley gazed straight up. All down the Mall people were standing and looking up into the sky, first one
gull leading, then another, and in this extraordinary silence and peace, in this pallor, in this purity, bells
struck eleven times, the sound fading up there among the gulls.
The aeroplane turned turned and raced and swooped exactly where it liked, swiftly, freely, like a skater –
‘That’s an E,’ said Mrs Bletchley –
or a dancer –
‘It’s a toffee,’ murmured Mr Bowley)(and the car went in at the gates and nobody looked at it), and shutting off the smoke, away and away it
rushed, and the smoke faded and assembled itself round the broad white shapes of the clouds.
11) Happily Rezia put her hand down with a tremendous weight on his knee so that he was weighted down,
transfixed, or the excitement of the elm trees rising and falling, rising and falling with all their leaves alight
and the colour thinning and thickening from blue to the green of a hollow wave, like plumes on horses’
heads, feathers on ladies’, so proudly they rose and fell, so superbly, would have sent him mad. But he would
not go mad. He would shut his eyes; he would see no more.
But they beckoned; leaves were alive; trees were alive. And the leaves being connected by millions of fibres
with his own body, there on the seat, fanned it up and down; when the branch stretched he, too, made the
statement. The sparrows fluttering, rising, and falling in jagged fountains were part of the pattern; the white
and blue, barred with black branches. Sounds made harmonies with premeditation; the spaces between them
were as significant as the sounds. A child cried. Rightly far away a horn sounded. All taken together meant
birth of a new religion –
‘Septimus?’ said Rezia. He started violently. People must notice.
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Sezione 3:
12) The hall of the house was cool as a vault. Mrs Dalloway raised her hand to her eyes, and, as the maid
shut the door to, and she heard the swish of Lucy’s skirts, she felt like a nun who has left the world and feels
fold round her the familiar veils and the response to old devotions. The cook whistled in the kitchen. She
heard the click of the typewriter. It was her life, and, bending her head over the hall table, she bowed beneath
the influence, felt blessed and purified, saying to herself, as she took the pad with the telephone message on
it, how moments like this are buds on the tree of life, flowers of darkness they are, she thought (as if some
lovely rose had blossomed for her eyes only); not for a moment did she believe in God; but all the more, she
thought, taking up the pad, must one repay in daily life to servants, yes, to dogs and canaries, above all to
Richard her husband, who was the foundation of it – of the gay sounds, of the green lights, of the cook even
whistling, for Mrs Walker was Irish and whistled all day long – one must pay back from this secret deposit of
exquisite moments, she thought, lifting the pad, while Lucy stood by her, trying to explain how.
13) Like a nun withdrawing, or a child exploring a tower, she went upstairs, paused at the window, came to
the bathroom. There was the green linoleum and a tap dripping. There was an emptiness about the heart of
life; an attic room. Women must put off their rich apparel. At midday they must disrobe. She pierced the
pincushion and laid her feathered yellow hat on the bed. The sheets were clean, tight stretched in a broad
white band from side to side. Narrower and narrower would her bed be. The candle was half burnt down and
she had read deep in Baron Marbor’s Memoirs. She had read late at night of the retreat from Moscow. For
the House sat so long that Richard insisted, after her illness, that she must sleep undisturbed. And really she
preferred to read of the retreat from Moscow. He knew it. So the room was an attic; the bed narrow; and
lying there reading, for she slept badly, she could not dispel a virginity preserved through childbirth which
clung to her like a sheet.
14) But this question of love (she thought, putting her coat away), this falling in love with women. Take
Sally Seton; her relation in the old days with Sally Seton. Had not that, after all, been love?
She sat on the floor – that was her first impression of Sally – she sat on the floor with her arms round her
knees, smoking a cigarette… But all that evening she could not take her eyes off Sally. It was an
extraordinary beauty of the kind she most admired, dark, large-eyed, with that quality which, since she
hadn’t got it herself, she always envied – a sort of abandonment, as if she could say anything, do anything; a
quality much commoner in foreigners than in Englishwomen… There they sat, hour after hour, talking in her
bedroom at the top of the house, talking about life, how they were to reform the world. They meant to found
a society to abolish private property, and actually had a letter written, though not sent out. The ideas were
Sally’s, of course – but very soon she was just as excited – read Plato in bed before breakfast; read Morris,
read Shelley by the hour… The strange thing, on looking back, was the purity, the integrity, of her feeling for
Sally. It was not like a one’s feeling for a man. It was completely disinterested, and besides, ita had a quality
which could only exist between women, between women just grown up. It was protective, on her side;
sprang from a sense of being in league together, a presentiment of something that was bound to part them
(they spoke of marriage always as a catastrophe), which led to this chivalry, this protective feeling which
was much more on her side than Sally’s. For in those days she was completely reckless; did the most idiotic
things out of bravado; bicycled round the parapet on the terrace: smoked cigars. Absurd, she was – very
absurd. But the charm was overpowering, to her at least, so that she could remember standing in her bedroom
at the top of the house holding the hot-water can in her hands and sayinh aloud, ‘She is beneath this roof…
She is beneath this roof!’…
Then came the most exquisite moment of her whole life passing a stone urn with flowers in it. Sally stopped;
picked a flower; kissed her on the lips. The whole world might have turned upside down! The others
disappeared; there she was alone with Sally. And she felt that she had been given a present, wrapped up, and
told just to keep it, not to look at it – a diamond, something infinitely precious, wrapped up, which, as they
walked (up and down, up and down), she uncovered, or the radiance burn through, the revelation, the
religious feeling!-…
15) She had just broken into her fifty-second year. Months and months of it were still untouched. June, July,
August! Each still remained almost whole, and, as if to ctach the falling drop, Clarissa (crossing to the
dressing-table) plunged into the very heart of the moment, transfixed it, there – the moment of this June
morning on which was the pressure of all the other mornings, seeing the glass, the dressing-table, and all the
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bottles afresh, collecting the whole of her at one point (as she looked into the glass, seeing the delicate pink
face of the woman who was that very night to give a party; of Clarissa Dalloway; of herself.
How many million times she had seen her face, and always with the same imperceptible contraction! She
pursed her lips when she looked in the glass. It was to give her face point. That was her self – pointed; dartlike; definite. That was her self when some effort, some call on her to be her self, drew the parts together, she
alone knew how different, how incompatible and composed so for the world only into one centre, one
diamond, one woman who sat in her drawing-room and made a meeting-point, a radiancy no doubt in some
dull lives, a refuge for the lonely to come to, perhaps; she had helped young people, who were grateful to
her; had tried to be the same always, never showing a sign of all the other sides of her – faults, jealousies,
vanities, suspicions, like this of Lady Bruton not asking her to lunch; which, she thought (combing her hair
finally), is utterly base! Now, where was her dress?
16) Peter Walsh had got up and crossed to the window and stood with his back to her, flicking a bandanna
handkerchief from side to side. Masterly and dry and desolate he looked, his thin shoulder-blades lifting his
coat slightly; blowing his nose violently. Take me with you, Clarissa thought impulsively, as if he were
starting directly upon some great voyage; and then, next moment, it was as if the five acts of a play that had
been very exciting and moving were now over and she had lived a lifetime in them and had run away, had
lived with Peter, and it was now over.
Now it was time to move, and, as a woman gathers her things together, her cloak, her gloves, her operaglasses, and gets up to go out of the theatre into the street, she rose from the sofa and went to Peter.
17) The sound of Big Ben striking the half-hour struck out between them with extraordinary vigour, as if a
young man, strong, indifferent, inconsiderate, were swinging dumb-bells this way and that.
‘Hullo, Elizabeth!’ cried Peter, stuffing his handkerchief into his pocket, going quickly to her, saying ‘Goodbye, Clarissa’ without looking at her, leaving the room quickly, and running downstairs and opening the hall
door.
‘Peter! Peter!’ cried Clarissa, following him out on to the landing. ‘My party! Remember my party tonight!’
she cried, having to raise her voice against the roar of the open air, and, overwhelmed by the traffic and the
sound of all the clocks striking, her voice crying ‘Remember my party tonight!’ sounded frail and thin and
very far away as Peter Walsh shut the door.
Sezione 6:
18) No crime; love; he repeated, fumbling for his card and pencil, when a Skye terrier snuffed his trousers
and he started in an agony of fear. It was turning into a man! He could not watch it happen! It was horrible,
terrible to see a dog become a man! At once the dog trotted away…
The earth thrilled beneath him. Red flowers grew through his flesh; their stiff leaves rustled by his head.
Music began clanging against the rocks up here. It is a motor horn down in the street, he muttered; but up
here it cannoned from rock to rock, divided, met in shocks of sound which rose in smooth columns (that
music should be visible was a discovery) and became an anthem, an anthem twined round now by a shepherd
boy’s piping (That’s an old man playing a penny whistle by the public-house, he muttered) which, as the boy
stood still, came bubbling from his pipe, and then, as he climbed higher, made its exquisite plaint while the
traffic passed beneath. This boy’s elegy is played among the traffic, thought Septimus. Now he withdraws up
into the snows, and roses hang about him – the thick red roses which grow on my bedroom wall, he
reminded himself. The music stopped. He has his penny, he reasoned it out, and has gone on to the next
public-house.
But he himself remained high on his rick, like a drowned sailor on a rock. I leant over the edge of the boat
and fell down, he thought. I went under the sea. I have been dead, and yet am now alive, but let me rest still,
he begged (he was talking to himself again – it was awful, awful!); and as before waking, the voices of birds
and the sound of wheels chime and chatter in a queer harmony, grow louder and louder, and the sleeper feels
himself drawing to the shores of life, so he felt himself drawing towards life, the sun growing hotter, cries
sounding louder, something tremendous about to happen….
‘It’ is time,’ said Rezia.
The word ‘time’ split its husk; poured its riches over him; and from his lips fell like shells, like shavings
from a plane, without his making them, hard, white, imperishable, words, and flew to attach themselves to
their places in an ode to Time; an immortal ode to Time. He sang. Evans answered from behind a tree. The
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dead were in Thessaly, Evan sang, among the orchids. There they waited till the War was over, and now the
dead, now Evans himself –
‘For God’s sake don’t come!’ Septimus cried out. For he could not look upon the dead.
But the branches parted. A man in grey was actually walking towards them. It was Evans! But no mud was
on him; no wounds; he was not changed. I must tell the whole world, Septimus cried, raising his hand (as the
dead man in the grey suit came nearer), raising his hand like some colossal figure whi has lamented the fate
of man for ages in the desert alone with his hands pressed to his forehead, furrows of despair on his cheeks,
and now sees light on the desert’s edge which broadens and strikes the iron-black figure (and Septimus half
rose from his chair), and with legions of men prostrate behind him he, the giant mourner, receives from one
moment on his face the whole- …
19) She had a perfectly clear notion of what she wanted. Her emotions were all on the surface. Beneath, she
was very shrewd – a far better judge of character than Sally, for instance, and with it all, purely feminine;
with that extraordinary gift, that woman’s gift, of making a world of her own wherever she happened to be.
She came into a room; she stood, as he had often seen her, in a doorway with lots of people round her. But it
was Clarissa one remembered. Not that she was striking; not beautiful at all; there was nothing picturesque
about her; she never said anything specially clever; there she was, however; there she was.
20) Oddly enough, she was one of the most thorough-going sceptics he had ever met, and possibly (this was
a theory he used to make up to account for her, so transparent in some waysm so inscrutable in others),
possibly she said to herself, As we are a doomed race, chained to a sinking ship (her favourite reading as a
girl was Huxley and Tyndall, and they were fond of these nautical metaphors), as the whole thing is a bad
joke, let us, at any rate, do our part; mitigate the sufferings of our fellow-prisoners (Huxley again); decorate
the dungeon with flowers and air-cushions; be as decent as we possibly can. Those ruffians, the Gods, shan’t
have it all their own way – her notion being that the Gods, who never lost a chance of hurting, thwarting and
spoiling human lives, were seriously put out of it, all the same, you behaved like a lady. That phase came
directly after Sylvia’s death – that horrible affair. To see your own sister killed by a falling tree (all Justin
Parry’s fault – all his carelessness) before your eyes, a girl too on the verge of life, the most gifted of them,
Clarissa always said, was enough to turn one bitter. Later she wasn’t to positive, perhaps; she thought there
were no Gods; no one was to blame; and so she evolved this atheist’s religion of doing good for the sake of
goodness.
21) A sound interrupted him; a frail quivering sound, a voice bubbling up without direction, vigour,
beginning or end, running weakly and shrilly and with an absence of all human meaning into
ee uum fah um so
foo swee too eem oo –
the voice of no age or sex, the voice of an ancient spring spouting from the earth; which issued, just opposite
Regent’s Park Tube Station, from a tall quivering shape, like a funnel, like a rusty pump, like a wind-beaten
tree for ever barren of leaves which lets the wind run up and down its branches signing
ee uum fah um so
foo swee too eem oo,
and rocks and creaks and moans in the eternal breeze.
Through all ages – when the pavement was grass, when it was swamp, through the age of tusk and
mammoth, through the age of silent sunrise – the battered woman – for she wore a skirt – with her right hand
exposed, her left clutching at her side, stood singing of love – love which has lasted a million years, she
sang, love which prevails, and millions of years ago her lover, who had been dead these centuries, had
walked, she crooned, with her in May; but in the course of ages, long as summer days, and flaming, she
remembered, with nothing but red asters, he had gone; death’s enormous sickle had swept those tremendous
hills, and when at last she laid her hoary and immensely aged head on the earth, now become a mere cinder
of ice, she implored the Gods to lay by her side a bunch of purple heather, there on her high burial place
which the last rays of the last sun caressed; for then the pageant of the universe would be over…
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22) Septimus was one of the first to volunteer. He went to France to save England which consisted almost
entirely of Shakespeare’s plays and Miss Isabel Pole in a green dress walking in a square. There in the
trenches the change which Mr Brewer desired when he advised football was produced instantly; he
developed manliness; he was promoted; he drew the attention, indeed the affection of his officer, Evans by
name. It was a case of two dogs playing on a hearthrug; one worrying a paper screw, snarling, snapping,
giving a pinch, now and then, at the old dog’s ear; the other lying somnolent, blinking at the fire, raising a
paw, turning and growling good-temperedly. They had to be together, share with each other, fight with each
other, quarrel with each other. But when Evans (Rezia, who had only seen him once, called him ‘a quiet
man’, a sturdy red-haired man, undemonstrative in the company of women), when Evans was killed just
before the Armistice, in Italy, Septimus, far from showing any emotion or recognizing that here was the end
of a friendship, congratulated himself upon feeling very little and very reasonably. The War had taught him.
It was sublime. He had gone through the whole show, friendship, European War, death, had won promotion,
was still under thirty and was bound to survive. He was right there. The last shells missed him. He watched
them explode with indifference. When peace came he was in Milan, billeted in the house of an innkeeper
with a courtyard, flowers in tubs, little tables in the open, daughters making hats, and to Lucrezia, the
younger daughter, he because engaged one evening when the panic was on him – that he could not feel…
… Human nature, in short, was on him – the repulsive brute, with the blood-red nostrils. Holmes was on
him. Dr Holmes came quite regularly every day. Once you stumble, Septimus wrote on the back of a
postcard, human nature is on you. Homles is on you. Their only chance was to escape, without letting
Holmes know; to Italy – anywhere, anywhere, away from Dr Holmes…
…It was at that moment (Rezia had gone shopping) that the great revelation took place. A voice spoke from
behind the screen. Evans was speaking. The dead were with him…
Sezione 7:
23) To his patients he gave three-quarters of an hour; and if in this exacting science which has to do with
what, after all, we know nothing about – the nervous system, the human brain – a doctor loses his sense of
proportion, as a doctor he fails. Health we must have; and health is proportion; so that when a man comes
into your room and says he is Christ (a common delusion), and has a message, as they mostly have, and
threatens, as they often do, to kill themselves, you invoke proportion; order rest in bed; rest in solitude;
silence and rest; rest without friends, without books, without messages, six months’ rest; until a man who
went in weighing seven stone six comes out weighing twelve… Worshipping proportion, Sir William not
only prospered himself but made England prosper, secluded her lunatics, forbade childbirth, penalized
despair, made it impossible for the unfit to propagate their views until they, too, shared his sense of
proportion – his, if they were men, Lady Bradshaw’s if they were women (she embroidered, knitted, spent
four nights out of seven at home with her son), so that not only did his colleagues respect him, his
subordinates fear him, but the friends and relations of his patients felt for him the keenest gratitude for
insisting that these prophetic Christs and Christesses, who prophesied the end of the world, or the advent of
God, should drink milk in bed, as Sir William ordered; Sir William with his thirty years’ experience of these
kinds of cases, and his infallible instinct, this is madness, this sense; his sense of proportion. (pp. 129-130)
24) And they [Richard and Hugh] went further and further from her [Millicent Bruton], being attached to her
by a thin thread (since they had lunched with her) which would stretch and stretch, get thinner and thinner as
they walked across London; as if one’s friends were attached to one’s body, after lunching with them, by a
thin thread, which (as she dozed there) became hazy with the sound of bells, striking the hour or ringing to
service, as a single spider’s thread is blotted with raindrops, and, burdened, sags down. So she slept.
And Richard Dalloway and Hugh Whitbread hesitated at the corner of Conduit Street at the very moment
that Millicent Bruton, lying on the sofa, let the thread snap; snored. Contrary winds buffeted at the street
corner. They looked in at a shop window; they did not wish to buy or to talk but to part, only with contrary
winds buffeting the street corner, with some sort of lapse in the tides of the body, two forces meeting in a
swirl, morning and afternoon, they paused…
25) But suppose Peter said to her, ‘Yes, yes, but your parties – what’s the sense of your parties?’ all she
could say was (and nobody could be expected to understand): They’re an offering; which sounded horribly
vague… But to go deeper, beneath what people said (and these judgements, how superficial, how
fragmentary they are!) in her own mind now, what did it mean to her, this thing called life? Oh, it was very
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queer. Here was So-and-so in South Kensington; someone up in Bayswater; and somebody else, say, in
Mayfair. And she felt quite continuously a sense of their existence; and she felt what a waste, and she felt
what a pity; and she felt if only they could be brought together; so she did it. And it was an offering; to
combine, to create, but to whom?
And offering for the sake of offering, perhaps. Anyhow, it was her gift…
26) Yes, Miss Kilman stood on the landing, and wore a mackintosh; but had her reasons. First, it was cheap;
second, she was over forty; and did not, after all, dress to please. She was poor, moreover; degradingly poor.
Otherwise she would not be taking jobs from people like the Dalloways; from rich people, who liked to be
kind. Mr Dalloway, to do him justice, had been kind. But Mrs Dalloway had not. She had been merely
condescending. She came from the most worthless of all classes – the rich, with a smattering of culture. They
had expensive things everywhere; pictures, carpets, lots of servants. She considered that she had a perfect
right to anything that the Dalloways did for her.
27) Love and religion! Thought Clarissa, going back into the drawing-room, tingling all over. How
detestable, how detestable they are! For now that the body of Miss Kilman was not before her, it
overwhelmed her – the idea. The cruellest things in the world, she thought, seeing them clumsy, hot,
domineering, hypocritical, eavesdropping, jealous, infinitely cruel and unscrupulous, dressed in a macintosh
coat, on the landing; love and religion. Had she ever tried to convert anyone herself? Did she not wish
everybody merely to be themselves? And she watched out of the window the old lady opposite climbing
upstairs. Let her climb upstairs if she wanted to; let her stop; then let her, as Clarissa had often seen her, gain
her bedroom, part her curtains, and disappear again into the background. Somehow one respected that – that
old woman looking out of the window, quite unconscious that she was being watched. There was something
solemn in it – but love and religion would destroy that, whatever it was, the privacy of the soul. The odious
Kilman would destroy it. Yet it was a sight that made her want to cry…
Why creeds and prayers and macintoshes? When, thought Clarissa, that’s the miracle, that’s the mystery; that
old lady, she meant, whom she could see going from chest of drawers to dressing-table. She could still see
her. And the supreme mystery which Kilman might say she had solved, or Petr might say he had solved, but
Clarissa didn’t believe either of them had the ghost of an idea of solving, was this: here was one room; there
another. Did religion solve that?
28) Love – but here the other clock, the clock which always struck two minutes after the Big Ben, came
shuffling in with its lap full of odds and ends, which it dumped down as if Big Ben were all very well with
his majesty laying down the law, so solemn, so just, but she must remember all sorts of little things besides –
Mrs Marsham, Ellie Henderson, glasses for ices – all sorts of little things came flooding and lapping and
dancing in on the wake of that solemn stroke which lay flat like a bar of gold on the sea. Mrs Marsham, Ellie
Henderson, glasses for ices. She must telephone now at once.
29) Do her hair as she might, her forehead remained like an egg, bald, white. No clothes suited her. She
might buy anything. And for a woman, of course, that meant never meeting the opposite sex. Never would
she come first with anyone. Sometimes lately it had seemed to her that, except for Elizabeth, her food was all
that she lived for; her comforts; her dinner, her tea; her hot-water bottle at night. But one must fight; naquish;
have faith in God…
…
‘Are you going to the party tonight?’ Miss Kilman said. Elizabeth supposed she was going; her mother
wanted her to go. She must not let parties absorb her, Miss Kilman said, fingering the last two inches of a
chocolate éclair…
‘I never go to parties,’ said Miss Kilman, just to keep Elizabeth from going. ‘People don’t ask me to parties –
and she knew as she said it that it was this egotism that was her undoing; Mr Whittaker had warned her; but
she could not help it. She had suffered so horribly. ‘Why should they ask me?’ she said. ‘I’m plain, I’m
unhappy.’ She knew it was idiotic. But it was all those people passing – people with parcels who despised
her – who made her say it. However, she was Doris Kilman. She had her degree. She was a woman who had
made her way in the world. Her knowledge of modern history was more than respectable.
‘I don’t pity myself,’ she said. ‘I pity’ – she meant to say ‘your mother’, but no, she could not, not to
Elizabeth. ‘I pity other people much more.’
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Like some dumb creature who has been brought up to a gate for an unknown purpose, and stands there
longing to gallop away, Elizabeth Dalloway sat silent. Was Miss Kilman going to say anything more?
‘Don’t quite forget me,’ said Doris Kilman; her voice quivered. Right away to the end of the field the dumb
creature galloped in terror…
She had gone. Miss Kilman sat at the marble table among the éclairs, stricken once, twice, thrice by shocks
of suffering. She had gone. Mrs Dalloway had triumphed. Elizabeth had gone. Beauty had gone; youth had
gone.
30) She [Elizabeth] penetrated a little farther in the direction of St Paul’s. She like the geniality, sisterhood,
motherhood, brotherhood of this uproar. It seemed to her good. The noise was tremendous; and suddenly
there were trumpets (the unemployed) blaring, rattling about in the uproar; military music; as if people were
marching; yet had they been dying – had some woman breathed her last, and whoever was watching, opening
the window of the room where she had just brought off that act of supreme dignity, looked down on Fleet
Street, that uproar, that military music would have come triumphing up to him, consolatory, indifferent.
31) Holmes was coming upstairs. Holmes would burst open the door. Holmes would say, ‘In a funk, eh?’
Holmes would get him. But no; not Holmes; not Bradshaw. Getting up rather unsteadily, hopping indeed
from foot to foot, he considered Mrs Filmer’s nice clean bread-knife with ‘Bread’ carved on the handle. Ah,
but one mustn’t spoil that. The gas fire? But it was too late now. Holmes was coming. Razors he might have
got, but Rezia, who always did that sort of thing, had packed them. There remained only the window, the
large Bloomsbury lodging-house window; the tiresome, the troublesome, and rather melodramatic business
of opening the window and throwing himself out. It was their idea of tragedy, not his or Rezia’s (for she was
with him). Holmes and Bradshaw liked that sort of thing. (He sat on the sill.) But he would wait till the very
last moment. He did not want to die. Life was good. The sun hot. Only human beings? Coming down the
staircase opposite an old man stopped and stared at him. Holmes was at the door. ‘I’ll give it you!’ he cried,
and flung himself vigorously, violently down on to Mrs Filmer’s area railings.
Sezione 8:
32) One of the triumphs of civilization, Peter Walsh thought. It is one of the triumphs of civilization, as the
light high bell of the ambulance sounded. Swiftly, cleanly, the ambulance sped to the hospital, having picked
up instantly, humanely, some poor devil; some one hit on the head, struck down by disease, knocked over
perhaps a minute or so ago at one of these crossings, as might happen to oneself. That was civilization. It
struck him coming back from the East – the efficiency, the organization, the communal spirit of London.
Every cart or carriage of its own accord drew aside to let the ambulance pass. Perhaps it was morbid; or it
was not touching rather, the respect which they showed this ambulance with its victim inside – busy men
hurrying home, yet instantly bethinking them as it passed of some wife; or presumably how easily it might
have been them there, stretched on a shelf with a doctor and a nurse… Ah, but thinking became morbid,
sentimental, directly one began conjuring up doctors, dead bodies; a little glow of pleasure, a sort of lust, too,
over the visual impression warned one not to go on with that sort of thing any more – fatal to art, fatal to
friendship. True. And yet, thought Peter Walsh, as the ambulance turned the corner, though the light high
bell could be heard down the next street and still further as it crossed the Tottenham Court Road, chiming
constantly, it is the privilege of loneliness; in privacy one may do as one chooses. One might weep if no one
saw. It had been his undoing – this susceptibility – in Anglo-Indian society; not weeping at the right time, or
laughing either. I have that in me, he thought, standing by the pillar-box, which could now dissolve in tears.
Why, heaven knows. Beauty of some sort probably, and the weight of the day, which, beginning with that
visit to Clarissa, had exhausted him with its heat, its intensity, and the drip, drip of one impression after
another down into that cellar where they stood, deep, dark, and no one would ever know. Partly for that
reason, its secrecy, complete and inviolable, he had found life like an unknown garden, full of turns and
corners, surprising, yes; really it took one’s breath away, these moments; there coming to him by the pillarbox opposite the British Museum one of them, a moment, in which things came together; this ambulance;
and life and death. It was as if he were sucked up to some very high roof by that rush of emotion, and the rest
of him, like a white shell-sprinkled beach, left bare. It had been his undoing in Anglo-Indian society – this
susceptibility.
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33) … Clarissa had a theory in those days – they had heaps of theories, always theories, as young people
have. It was to explain the feeling they had of dissatisfaction; not knowing people; not being known. For
how could they know each other? You met every day; then not for six months, or years. It was
unsatisfactory, they agreed, how little one knew people. But she said, sitting on the bus going up Shaftesbury
Avenue, she felt herself everywhere; not ‘here, here, here’; and she tapped the back of the seat; but
everywhere. She waved her hand, going up Shaftesbury Avenue. She was all that. So that to know her, or
any one, one must seek out the people who completed them; even the places. Odd affinities sha had with
people she had never spoken to, some woman in the street, some man behind a counter – even trees, or barns.
It ended in a transcendental theory which, with her horror of death, allowed her to believe, or say that she
believed (for all her scepticism), that since our apparitions, the part of us which appears, are so momentary
compared with the other, the unseen part of us, which spreads wide, the unseen might survive, be recovered
somehow attached to this person or that, or even haunting certain places, after death. Perhaps – perhaps.
Looking back over that long friendship of almost thirty years her theory worked to this extent. Brief, broken,
often painful as their actual meetings had been, what with his absences and interruptions (this morning, for
instance, in came Elizabeth, like a long-legged colt, handsome, dumb, just as he was beginning to talk to
Clarissa), the effect of them on his life was immeasurable. There was mystery about it. You were given a
sharp, acute, uncomfortable grain – the actual meeting; horribly painful as often as not; yet in absence, in the
most unlikely places, it would flower out, open, shed its scent, let you touch, taste, look about you, get the
whole feel of it and understanding, after years of lying lost. Thus she had come to him; on board ship; in the
Himalayas; suggested by the oddest things (so Sally Seton, generous, enthusiastic goose! thought of him
when she saw blue hydrangeas). She had influenced him more than any person he had ever known. And
always in this way coming before him without his wishing it, cool, lady-like, critical; or ravishing, romantic,
recalling some field of English harvest. He saw her most often in the country, not in London. One scene after
another at Bourton…
34) It was not beauty pure and simple – Bedford Place leading into Russell Square. It was straightness and
emptiness of course; the symmetry of a corridor; but it was also windows lit up, a piano, a gramophone
sounding; a sense of pleasure-making hidden, but now and again emerging when, through the uncurtained
window, the window left open, one saw parties sitting over tables, young people slowly circling,
conversations between men and women, maids idly looking out (a strange comment theirs, when work was
done), stockings drying on top ledges, a parrot, a few plants. Absorbing, mysterious, of infinite richness, this
life. And in the large square where the cabs shot and swerved so quick, there were loitering couples,
dallying, embracing, shrunk up under the shower of a tree; that was moving; so silent, so absorbed, that one
passed, discreetly, timidly, as if in the presence of some sacred ceremony to interrupt which would have been
impious. That was interesting. And so on into the flare and glare.
His light overcoat blew open, he stepped with indescribable idiosyncrasy, leant a little forward, tripped, with
his hands behind his back and his eyes still a little hawk-like; he tripped through London, towards
Westminster, observing…
…The cold stream of visual impressions failed him now as if the eye were a cup that overflowed and let the
rest run down its china walls unrecorded. The brain must wake now. The body must contract now, entering
the house, the lighted house, where the door stood open, where the motor cars were standing, and bright
women descending: the soul must brave itself to endure. He opened the big blade of his pocket-knife.
Sezione 9:
35) And yet for her own part, it was too much of an effort. She was not enjoying it. It was too much like
being – just anybody, standing there; anybody could do it; yet this anybody she did little admire, couldn’t
help feeling that she had, anyhow, made this happen, that it marked a stage, this post that she felt herself to
have become, for oddly enough she had quite forgotten what she looked like, but felt herself a stake driven in
at the top of her stairs. Every time she gave a party she had this feeling of being something not herself, and
that everyone was unreal in one way; much more real in another. It was, she thought, partly their clothes,
partly being taken out of their ordinary ways, partly the background; it was possible to say things you
couldn’t say anyhow else, things that needed an effort; possible to go much deeper. But not for her, not yet
anyhow.
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36) Sinking her voice, drawing Mrs Dalloway into the shelter of a common femininity, a common pride in
the illustrious qualities of husbands and their sad tendency to overwork, Lady Bradshaw (poor goose – one
didn’t dislike her) murmured how, ‘just as we were starting, my husband was called up on the telephone, a
very sad case. A young man (that is what Sir William is telling Mr Dalloway) had killed himself. He had
been in the army.’ Oh! thought Clarissa, in the middle of my party, here’s death, she thought.
She went on, into the little room where the Prime Minister had gone with Lady Bruton…
… What business had the Bradshws to talk of death at her party? A young man had killed himself. And they
talked of it at her party – the Bradshaws talked of death. He had killed himself – but how? Always her body
went through it, when she was told, first, suddenly, of an accident; her dress flamed, her body burnt. He had
thrown himself from a window. Up had flashed the ground; through him, blundering, bruising, went the rusty
spikes. There he lay with a thud, thud, thud in his brain, and then a suffocation of blackness. So she saw it.
But why had he done it? And the Bradshaws talked of it at a party!
She had once thrown a shilling into the Serpentine, never anything more. But he had flung it away. They
went on living (she would have to go back; the rooms were still crowded; people kept on coming). They (all
day she had been thinking of Bourton, of Peter, of Sally), they would grow old. A thing there was that
mattered; a thing, wreathed about with chatter, defaced, obscured in her own life, let drop every day, in
corruption, lies, chatter. This he had preserved. Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate,
people feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart;
rapture faded; one was alone. There was an embrace in death.
But this young man who had killed himself – had he plunged holding his treasure? ‘If it were now to die, ’t
were now to be most happy,’ she had said to herself once, coming down, in white.
Or there were poets and thinkers. Suppose he had had that passion, and had gone to Sir William Bradshaw, a
great doctor, yet to her obscurely evil, without sex or lust, extremely polite to women, but capable of some
indescribable outrage – forcing your soul, that was it – if this young man had gone to him, and Sir William
had impressed him, like that, with his power, might he not then have said (indeed she felt it now), Life is
made intolerable; they make life intolerable, men like that?
Then (she had felt it only this morning) there was the Terror; the overwhelming incapacity, one’s parents
giving it into one’s hands, this life, to be lived to the end, to be walked with serenely; there was in the depths
of her heart an awful fear. Even now, quite often if Richard had not been there reading The Times, so that she
could crouch like a bird and gradually revive, send roaring up that immeasurable delight, rubbing stick to
stick, one thing with another, she must have perished. She had escaped. But that young man had killed
himself.
Somehow it was her disaster – her disgrace. It was her punishment to see sink and disappear here a man,
there a woman, in this profound darkness, and she forced to stand here in her evening dress. She had
schemed; she had pilfered. She was never wholly admirable. She had wanted success, lady Bexborough and
the rest of it. And once she had walked on the terrace at Bourton.
Odd, incredible; she had never been so happy. Nothing could be slow enough; nothing last too long. No
pleasure could equal, she thought, straightening the chairs, pushing in one book on the shelf, this having
done with the triumphs of youths, lost herself in the process of living, to find it, with a shock of delight, as
the sun rose, as the day sank. Many a time had she gone, at Bourton when they were all talking, to look at the
sky; or seen in London when she could not sleep. She walked to the window.
37) Oh, but how surprising! – in the room opposite the old lady stared straight at her! She was going to bed.
And the sky. It will be a solemn sky, she had thought, it will be a dusky sky, turning away its cheek in the
beauty. But there it was – ashen pale, raced over quickly by tapering vast clouds. It was new to her. The wind
must have risen. She was going to bed, in the room opposite. It was fascinating to watch her, moving about,
that old lady, crossing the room, coming to the window. Could she see her? It was fascinating, with people
still laughing and shouting in the drawing room, to watch that old woman, quite quietly, going to bed alone.
She pulled the blind now. The clock began striking. The young man had killed himself; but she did not pity
him; with the clocks striking the hour, one, two three, she did not pity him, with all this going on. There! The
old lady had put out her light! The whole house was dark now with this going on, she repeated, and the
words came to her, Fear no more the heat of the sun. She must go back to them. But what an extraordinary
night! She felt somehow very like him – the young man who had killed himself. She felt glad he had done it;
thrown it away while they went on living. The clock was striking. The leaden circles dissolved in the air. But
she must go back. She must assemble. She must find Sally and Peter. And she came in from the little room.
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38) ‘Richard has improved. You are right, ‘ said Sally. ‘I shall go and talk to him. I shall say good-night.
What does the brain matter,’ said Lady Rosseter, getting up, ‘compared with the heart?’
‘I will come,’ said Peter, but he sat on for a moment. What is this terror? What is this ecstasy? He thought to
himself. What is it that fills me with extraordinary excitement?
It is Clarissa, he said.
For there she was.
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