the moon and six pence 001

chapter 1

2018年12月19日

page004

“The faculty for myth is innate in the human race.  It seizes withavidity upon any incidents, surprising or mysterious, in the career of those who have at all distinguished themselves from their fellows, and invents alegend to which it then attaches a fanatical belief.  It is the protest ofromance against the commonplace of life.  The incidents of the legendbecome the hero's surest passport to immortality.  The ironic philosopherreflects with a smile that Sir Walter Raleigh is more safely inshrined in thememory of mankind because he set his cloak for the Virgin Queen to walkon than because he carried the English name to undiscovered countries.Charles Strickland lived obscurely.    He made enemies rather than friends.It is not strange, then, that those who wrote of him should have eked outtheir scanty recollections with a lively fancy, and it is evident that therewas enough in the little that was known of him to give opportunity to theromantic scribe; there was much in his life which was strange and terrible,in his character something outrageous, and in his fate not a little that waspathetic.  In due course a legend arose of such circumstantiality that thewise historian would hesitate to attack it.”

毛姆在这里毫不留情地调侃了人们对名人轶事的猎奇心理。吃瓜群众们善于把杰出同奇闻异事联系在一起，并以此为乐，完全忽略人与人的根本不同其实在于日常生活中的点点滴滴。