PortraitofanActress女演员肖像(3)

所以，跳过一页或两页，我们看看她目前作为母亲的下一幅肖像。两个孩子成为了她全部的热爱。她生活在远离伦敦的乡下，以家庭生活为中心，六点起床，擦擦洗洗、准备饭菜、缝缝补补、教育孩子，给小马套上用具，挤牛奶。她再一次获得了完美的快乐。同孩子们生活在村舍中，驾着小马车行进在乡间的路上，周日身穿青花棉布衣去教堂礼拜

At this point a very blank page confronts us. There is a gulf which we can only cross at a venture. Two sketches face each other; Ellen Terry in blue cotton among the hens; Ellen Terry robed and crowned as Lady Macbeth on the stage of the Lyceum. The two sketches are contradictory yet they are both of the same woman. She hates the stage; yet she adores it. She worships her children; yet she forsakes them. She would like to live for ever among pigs and ducks in the open; yet she spends the rest of her life among actors and actresses in the limelight. Her own attempt to explain the discrepancy is hardly convincing. ‘I have always been more woman than artist’ she says. Irving put the theatre first. ‘He had none of what I may call my bourgeois qualities—the love being in love, the love of a home, the dislike of solitude.’She tries to persuade us that she was an ordinary woman enough; a better hand at pastry than most; an adept at keeping houe; with an eye for colour, a taste for furniture, and a positive passion for washing children's heads. If she went back to the stage it was because--weell, what else could she do when the bailiffs were in the house?

对于我们来说，此时此刻遇到了很大的空白页。有一个海湾，我们也只有冒险横渡了。两幅肖像彼此面对；一幅是在鸡舍中身穿兰布衣服的爱伦·泰瑞；另一幅是在专业的舞台上身着礼服，头戴王冠扮演麦克白夫人的爱伦·泰瑞。两幅肖像矛盾，然而她们却是同一个女人。她憎恨舞台，却又喜欢它。她热爱孩子，却又放弃了他们。她愿意永远生活在野外猪鸭成群的环境里；却在银光灯下，在男女演员们中度过了自己的余生。她试图解释这种矛盾，可几乎令人很难信服。‘我一直是女人多于艺术家’她说。欧文把舞台放在第一位。‘他没有我所拥有的中产阶级的品质

This is the little sketch that she offers us to fill in the gap between the two Ellen Terrys—Ellen the mother, and Ellen the actress. But here we remember her warning: ’Why, even I myself know little or nothing of my real life.’ There was something in her that she did not understand; something that came surging up from the depths and swept her away in its clutches. The voice she heard in the lane was not the voice of Charles Reade; nor was it the voice of the bailiffs. It was the voice of her genius; the urgent call of something that she could not define, could not suppress, and must obey. So she left her children and followed the voice back the stage, back to the Lyceum, back to a long life of incessant toil, anguish, and glory.

这是她提供给我们的在两个爱伦·泰瑞间弥合缺陷的小人物的肖像—一个是作为母亲的爱伦，一个是作为女演员的爱伦。但在此我们记得她的提醒：‘哎，甚至连我自己都不了解我的真实生活。’她并不了解自己面临的值得重视的事情；它们来自心灵深处，而且她无法掌控。她在小路上听到的声音并不是查理·里德的声音，也不是执行官的声音，那是她天赋的表达；她无法确定那些急切呼唤的意图，她无法抗拒，而且必须服从。因此她离开了孩子们，跟着那声音回到了舞台上，回归了专业，回到了没有停歇、苦恼以及荣耀的漫长的生活中。

But, having gazed at the full-length portrait of Ellen terry as Sargent painted her, robed and crowned as Lady Macbeth, turn to the next page. It is done from another angle. Pen in hand, she is seated at her desk. A volume of Shakespeare lies before her. It is open at Cymbeline, and she is making careful notes in the margin. The part of Imogen presents great problems. She is, she says, ‘on the rack’ about her interpretation. Perhaps Bernard Shaw can throw light upon the question? A letter from the brilliant young critic of the Saturday Review lies beside Shakespeare. She has never met him but for years they have written to each other, intimately, ardently, disputatiously, some of the best letters in the language. He says the most outrageous things. He compares dear Henry to an ogre, and Ellen to a captive chained in his cage.  But Ellen Terry is quite capable of holding her own against Bernard Shaw. She scolds himfondles him, and contradicts him. She has a curious sympathy for the advanced views that Henry Irving abominated. But what suggestions has the brilliant critic to make about Imogen? None apparently that she has not already thought for herself. She is as close and critical a student of Shakespeare as he is. She has studied every line, weighed the meaning of each word, experimented with every gesture. Each of those golden moments when she becomes bodiless, not herself, is the result of months of minute and careful study. ‘Art,’ she quotes, ‘needs that which we can give her, I assure you.’ In fact this mutable woman, all instinct, and sensation, is as painstaking a student and as careful of the dignity of her art as Flaubert himself.