四、英国的政治传统

The Englishman has been called a political animal, and he values what is political and practical so much that ideas easily become objects of dislike in his eyes, and thinkers,  miscreants, because practice is everything, a free play of the mind is nothing.(46) The notion of the free play of the mind upon all subjects being a pleasure in itself, being an object of desire, being an essential provider of elements without which a nation’s spirit, whatever compensations it may have for them, must in the long run, die of emptiness, hardly enters into an Englishman’s thoughts. It is noticeable that the word curiosity, which in other languages is used in a good sense, to mean, as a high and fine quality of man’s nature, just this disinterested love of a free play of the mind on all subjects, for its own sake—it is noticeable, I say, that this word has in our language no sense of the kind, no sense but a rather bad and disparaging one. But criticism, real criticism, is essentially the exercise of this very quality. (47)It obeys an instinct prompting it to try to know the best that is known and thought in the world, irrespectively of practice, politics, and everything of the kind; and to value knowledge and thought as they approach this best, without the intrusion of any other considerations whatever.  (48)This is an instinct for which there is, I think, little original sympathy in the practical English nature, and what there was of it has undergone a long benumbing period of blight and suppression in the epoch of Romanticism.

(49)It is of the last importance that English criticism should clearly discern what rule for its course, in order to avail itself of the field now opening to it, and to produce fruit for the future, it ought to take. The rule may be summed up in one word-disinterestedness. And how is criticism to show disinterestedness? By keeping aloof from what is called “the practical view of things”; by resolutely following the law of its own nature, which is to be a free play of the mind on all subjects which it touches. (50)By steadily refusing to lend itself to any of those concealed, political, practical considerations about ideas, which plenty of people will be sure to attach to them, but which criticism has really nothing to do with. Its business is, as I have said, simply to know the best that is known and thought in the world, and by in its turn making this known, to create a current of true and fresh ideas. Its business is to do this with inflexible honesty, with due ability; but its business is to do no more.

答案

46.对所有事物的自由思考本身就是一种乐趣，一种愿望，为民族精神提供了赖以生存的重要因素。离开这些因素，不管有其他什么样的补偿，一个国家的民族精神终究将会由于空洞而消逝。但是这种认识很难进入英国人的思想。

47.它遵循一种本能，促使它不考虑实践、政治和所有类似的事物，汲取世界上知识和思想的精华;并且促使它在这个过程中不受任何其他考虑的侵扰，珍视知识和思想。

48.好奇是一种本能，但我认为，英国人讲究实际的本性中几乎找不到这一本能的痕迹;而且仅存的求知欲也在浪漫主义时代里，经历了长期的不良影响和压制而变得麻木了。

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