一双蓝眼睛 英文版 A Pair of Blue Eyes
托马斯.哈代 Thomas Hardy
PREFACE
'A violet in the youth of primy nature,
Forward, not permanent, sweet not lasting,
The perfume and suppliance of a minute;
No more.'
The following chapters were written at a time when the craze forindiscriminate church-restoration had just reached the remotestnooks of western England, where the wild and tragic features ofthe coast had long combined in perfect harmony with the crudeGothic Art of the ecclesiastical buildings scattered along it,throwing into extraordinary discord all architectural attempts atnewness there. To restore the grey carcases of a mediaevalismwhose spirit had fled, seemed a not less incongruous act than toset about renovating the adjoining crags themselves.
to erect my theatre for these imperfect?
Hence it happened that an imaginary history of three human hearts,whose emotions were not without correspondence with these materialcircumstances, found in the ordinary incidents of such church-renovations a fitting frame for its presentation.
The shore and country about 'Castle Boterel' is now getting wellknown, and will be readily recognized. The spot is, I may add,the furthest westward of all those convenient corners wherein Ihave ventured to erect my theatre for these imperfect littledramas of country life and passions; and it lies near to, or nogreat way beyond, the vague border of the Wessex kingdom on thatside, which, like the westering verge of modern Americansettlements, was progressive and uncertain.
This, however, is of little importance. The place is pre-eminently (for one person at least) the region of dream andmystery. The ghostly birds, the pall-like sea, the frothy wind,the eternal soliloquy of the waters, the bloom of dark purplecast, that seems to exhale from the shoreward precipices, inthemselves lend to the scene an atmosphere like the twilight of anight vision.
One enormous sea-bord cliff in particular figures in thenarrative; and for some forgotten reason or other this cliff wasdescribed in the story as being without a name. Accuracy wouldrequire the statement to be that a remarkable cliff whichresembles in many points the cliff of the description bears a namethat no event has made famous.
T. H.
March 1899