Остров Фарисеев

УДК 372.8
ББК 81.2 Англ93
Г 61

Голсуорси Дж.
Г 61
Остров Фарисеев: Книга для чтения на английском
языке. — СПб.: КАРО, 2007. — 384 с.

ISBN 9785898158811

ISBN 9785898158811
   © КАРО, 2007

Джон Голсуорси (18671933) — крупнейший британский
писатель, “английский Толстой”.
“Остров фарисеев” (1903) — первый из его наиболее
известных и читаемых романов. В нем в полной мере
раскрывается талант автора, мастера психологической прозы
и классика английской реалистической литературы.
Оригинальный 
текст 
снабжен 
постраничными
комментариями и словарем.

УДК 372.8
ББК 81.2 Англ93

THE ISLAND PHARISEES

PREFACE

Each man born into the world is born like Shelton in this
book — to go a journey, and for the most part he is born on
the high road. At first he sits there in the dust, with his little
chubby hands reaching at nothing, and his little solemn eyes
staring into space. As soon as he can toddle, he moves, by the
queer instinct we call the love of life, straight along this road,
looking neither to the right nor left, so pleased is he to walk.
And he is charmed with everything — with the nice flat road,
all broad and white, with his own feet, and with the prospect
he can see on either hand. The sun shines, and he finds the
road a little hot and dusty; the rain falls, and he splashes through
the muddy puddles. It makes no matter — all is pleasant; his
fathers went this way before him; they made this road for him
to tread, and, when they bred him, passed into his fibre the
love of doing things as they themselves had done them. So he
walks on and on, resting comfortably at nights under the roofs
that have been raised to shelter him, by those who went before.
Suddenly one day, without intending to, he notices a path
or opening in the hedge, leading to right or left, and he stands,

But this is a worshipful society.
King John

JOHN GALSWORTHY

looking at the undiscovered. After that he stops at all the
openings in the hedge; one day, with a beating heart, he
tries one.
And this is where the fun begins.
Out of ten of him that try the narrow path, nine of him
come back to the broad road, and, when they pass the next
gap in the hedge, they say: “No, no, my friend, I found you
pleasant for a while, but after that — ah! after that! The way
my fathers went is good enough for me, and it is obviously
the proper one; for nine of me came back, and that poor silly
tenth — I really pity him!”
And when he comes to the next inn, and snuggles in his
well-warmed bed, he thinks of the wild waste of heather where
he might have had to spend the night alone beneath the stars;
nor does it, I think, occur to him that the broad road he
treads all day was once a trackless heath itself.
But the poor silly tenth is faring on. It is a windy night
that he is travelling through a windy night, with all things
new around, and nothing to help him but his courage. Nine
times out of ten that courage fails, and he goes down into the
bog. He has seen the undiscovered, and — like Ferrand in
this book — the undiscovered has engulfed him; his spirit,
tougher than the spirit of the nine that turned back to sleep
in inns, was yet not tough enough. The tenth time he wins
across, and on the traces he has left others follow slowly, cautiously — a new road is opened to mankind! A true saying
goes: Whatever is, is right! And if all men from the world’s
beginning had said that, the world would never have begun —

THE ISLAND PHARISEES

at all. Not even the protoplasmic jelly could have commenced
its journey; there would have been no motive force to make
it start.
And so, that other saying had to be devised before the
world could set up business: Whatever is, is wrong! But since
the Cosmic Spirit found that matters moved too fast if those
that felt “All things that are, are wrong” equalled in number
those that felt “All things that are, are right,” It solemnly devised polygamy (all, be it said, in a spiritual way of speaking);
and to each male spirit crowing “All things that are, are wrong”
It decreed nine female spirits clucking “All things that are, are
right.” The Cosmic Spirit, who was very much an artist, knew
its work, and had previously devised a quality called courage,
and divided it in three, naming the parts spiritual, moral, physical. To all the male-bird spirits, but to no female (spiritually,
not corporeally speaking), It gave courage that was spiritual;
to nearly all, both male and female, It gave courage that was
physical; to very many hen-bird spirits It gave moral courage
too. But, because It knew that if all the male-bird spirits were
complete, the proportion of male to female — one to ten —
would be too great, and cause upheavals, It so arranged that
only one in ten male-bird spirits should have all three kinds
of courage; so that the other nine, having spiritual courage,
but lacking either in moral or in physical, should fail in their
extensions of the poultry-run. And having started them upon
these lines, it left them to get along as best they might.
Thus, in the subdivision of the poultry-run that we
call England, the proportion of the others to the complete

JOHN GALSWORTHY

male-bird spirit, who, of course, is not infrequently a woman,
is ninety-nine to one; and with every Island Pharisee, when
he or she starts out in life, the interesting question ought to
be, “Am I that one?” Ninety very soon find out that they are
not, and, having found it out, lest others should discover,
they say they are. Nine of the other ten, blinded by their
spiritual courage, are harder to convince; but one by one they
sink, still proclaiming their virility. The hundredth Pharisee
alone sits out the play.
Now, the journey of this young man Shelton, who is surely not the hundredth Pharisee, is but a ragged effort to present
the working of the truth “All things that are, are wrong,”
upon the truth “All things that are, are right.”
The Institutions of this country, like the Institutions of
all other countries, are but half-truths; they are the working
daily clothing of the nation; no more the body’s permanent
dress than is a baby’s frock. Slowly but surely they wear out,
or are outgrown; and in their fashion they are always thirty
years at least behind the fashions of those spirits who are concerned with what shall take their place. The conditions that
dictate our education, the distribution of our property, our
marriage laws, amusements, worship, prisons, and all other
things, change imperceptibly from hour to hour; the moulds
containing them, being inelastic, do not change, but hold on
to the point of bursting, and then are hastily, often clumsily,
enlarged. The ninety desiring peace and comfort for their
spirit, the ninety of the well-warmed beds, will have it that
the fashions need not change, that morality is fixed, that all

THE ISLAND PHARISEES

is ordered and immutable, that every one will always marry,
play, and worship in the way that they themselves are marrying, playing, worshipping. They have no speculation, and
they hate with a deep hatred those who speculate with
thought. This is the function they were made for. They are
the dough, and they dislike that yeasty stuff of life which
comes and works about in them. The Yeasty Stuff — the
other ten — chafed by all things that are, desirous ever of
new forms and moulds, hate in their turn the comfortable
ninety. Each party has invented for the other the hardest
names that it can think of: Philistines, Bourgeois, Mrs. Grundy1, Rebels, Anarchists, and Ne’er-do-wells. So we go on!
And so, as each of us is born to go his journey, he finds himself in time ranged on one side or on the other, and joins the
choruses of name-slingers.
But now and then — ah! very seldom — we find ourselves so near that thing which has no breadth, the middle
line, that we can watch them both, and positively smile to
see the fun.
When this book was published first, many of its critics
found that Shelton was the only Pharisee, and a most unsatisfactory young man — and so, no doubt, he is. Belonging to
the comfortable ninety, they felt, in fact, the need of slinging
names at one who obviously was of the ten. Others of its

1 Mrs. Grundy — персонаж пьесы Мортона (1798), олицетворение общественного мнения в вопросах приличия (what
will Mrs. Grundy say? — что скажут люди?)

JOHN GALSWORTHY

critics, belonging to the ten, wielded their epithets upon
Antonia, and the serried ranks behind her, and called them
Pharisees; as dull as ditch-water — and so, I fear, they are.
One of the greatest charms of authorship is the privilege
it gives the author of studying the secret springs of many
unseen persons, of analysing human nature through the criticism that his work evokes — criticism welling out of the
instinctive likings or aversions, out of the very fibre of the
human being who delivers it; criticism that often seems to
leap out against the critic’s will, startled like a fawn from some
deep bed, of sympathy or of antipathy. And so, all authors
love to be abused — as any man can see.
In the little matter of the title of this book, we are all
Pharisees, whether of the ninety or the ten, and we certainly
do live upon an Island.
JOHN GALSWORTHY.
January 1, 1908

PART I
THE TOWN