【英文原著类】a footnote to history(历史脚注).pdf

A Footnote to History
A Footnote to History
By Robert Louis Stevenson
1
A Footnote to History
CHAPTER I - THE ELEMENTS
OF DISCORD: NATIVE
THE story I have to tell is still going on as I write; the characters are
alive and active; it is a piece of contemporary history in the most exact
sense. And yet, for all its actuality and the part played in it by mails
and telegraphs and iron warships, the ideas and the manners of the native
actors date back before the Roman Empire. They are Christians,
church-goers, singers of hymns at family worship, hardy cricketers; their
books are printed in London by Spottiswoode, Trubner, or the Tract
Society; but in most other points they are the contemporaries of our
tattooed ancestors who drove their chariots on the wrong side of the
Roman wall. We have passed the feudal system; they are not yet clear
of the patriarchal. We are in the thick of the age of finance; they are in
a period munism. And this makes them hard to understand.
To us, with our feudal ideas, Samoa has the first appearance of a land
of despotism. An elaborate courtliness marks the race alone among
Polynesians; terms of ceremony fly thick as oaths on board a ship;
commoners my-lord each other when they meet - and urchins as they
play marbles. And for the real noble a whole private dialect is set apart.
mon names for an axe, for blood, for bamboo, a bamboo knife,
a pig, food, entrails, and an oven are taboo in his presence, as the
common names for a bug and for many offices and members of the body
are taboo in the drawing-rooms of English ladies. Special words are set
apart for his leg, his face, his hair, his belly, his eyelids, his son, his
daughter, his wife, his wife's pregnancy, his wife's adultery, adultery
with his wife, his dwelling, his spear, b, his sleep, his dreams, his
anger, the mutual anger of several chiefs, his food, his pleasure in
eating, the food and eating of his pigeons, his ulcers, his cough, his
sickness, hi