Читать книгу Seven Gothic Tales онлайн

2 страница из 8

To fit the occasion, an introduction to the seven stories--are they stories?--in this book, should, therefore, contain nothing but the exhortation, "Here, read one for yourself. You'll need no introduction to make you read the volume." But having just finished a second reading of the volume, myself, I am so much under its spell (it feels exactly like a spell) that I must seize this opportunity for babbling about it. Yet I can't even tell you the first fact about it which everybody wants to know about a book--who is the author. In this case, all that we are told is that the author is a Continental European, writing in English although that is not native to his pen, who wishes his-or-her identity not to be known, although between us be it said, it is safe from the setting of the tales to guess that he is not a Sicilian. Really all there is to tell you beforehand is what you will see for yourself as soon as you begin to read, that the people in this book are a race apart.

Although solidly set in an admirably described factual background somewhere on the same globe we inhabit, in a past mostly no longer ago than sometime in the nineteenth century, although they are human beings, young men, maidens, old men, old women, they are unlike us and the people we know in books and in real life, because the attitude towards life which they have is different from ours, or from any attitude we have met in life or in books. All those who are given leading rôles in these stories have in their youth expected more out of life than it had to give--wait a moment!--you are jumping to the conclusion that the book is just some more Romantic School stuff. You are mistaken. Romantic School characters, after encountering this disappointment, spend the rest of their lives spooning up out of their disillusion the softest and most delicately flavored custard of self-pity. If the characters in these stories ever feel pity for anything, it is a cold, disdainful pity for life itself in being so meanly smaller and poorer and safer than they would have made it, had they been God. Stop!--you are thinking of Byron. You are wrong. Byron was a poet of genius. At least that is what is said about him by people who ought to know. And I daresay these stories, for all their bizarre power, can scarcely expect to have the thumping signboard of genius hung up above the stand in the literary market where they are for sale. But Byron's moral atmosphere is that of a naïve, kindly, immature youth compared to the tense, fierce, hard, controlled, over-civilized, savage something-or-other, for which I find no name, created in this book by its anonymous author.