영어로 읽는 고전 _ 로버트 히첸스의 야망의 길
로버트 히첸스의 《야망의 길》은 20세기 초에 쓰인 소설이다. 이야기는 주로 군중으로부터 벗어난 삶과 인정을 갈망하는 젊은 여성 차미언을 중심으로, 등장인물들의 삶과 야망에 초점을 맞춘다. 이 이야기는 예술적 열망과 사회적 기대, 그리고 문화적 맥락 안에서 펼쳐지는 인간관계의 역학을 탐구한다. 소설의 서두에서 우리는 차미언과 그녀의 어머니 맨스필드 부인이 응접실에서 콘월 출신의 작곡가 클로드 히스에 대해 나누는 대화를 통해 두 사람을 만난다. 차미언은 새로운 영국 음악의 물결에 대한 열망을 표현하며, 아직 명성을 얻지 못한 히스에게 깊은 관심을 보인다. 도입부는 그들의 대화와 사교적 교류를 묘사하며, 예술적 인정에 대한 차미언의 깊은 갈망과 야망과 정체성에 대한 그녀의 복잡한 감정을 암시한다. 등장인물들이 히스의 배경과 가능성에 대해 이야기를 나누면서, 차미언과 히스 사이의 연결고리가 암시되고, 이는 이야기 전반에 걸쳐 펼쳐질 야망의 탐구와 인물들 사이의 긴장감을 위한 무대를 마련한다.
Classics Read in English _ The Way of Ambition by Robert Hichens
There are people who enter a drawing room and fill it. And there are people who enter a drawing room and feel, with every step across its carpet, that they were made for somewhere larger.
Charmian is the second kind. She knows it. Her mother, Mrs. Mansfield, knows it too — though she has spent considerable energy over the years cultivating the delicate fiction that what Charmian feels is merely high spirits, a youthful restlessness that marriage and routine will eventually smooth into something manageable. Charmian, for her part, is not persuaded. She wants recognition. She wants art. She wants a new wave of English music to sweep away the polite, correct, thoroughly unmemorable sounds that have been filling concert halls with the regularity of wallpaper.
And then someone mentions Claude Heath.
He is a composer from Cornwall — obscure, unfamous, and possessed, by all accounts, of something genuine. In a world of accomplished mediocrity, the word genuine lands on Charmian like a stone dropped into still water. She has not yet met him. She has only heard his name spoken across a drawing room by someone who does not quite know what to make of him. But she is already paying attention in that particular way she has — focused, hungry, alert to possibility in the way that only those who have spent years waiting for it can be.
Robert Hichens understands ambition the way a surgeon understands anatomy — not as a simple force but as a system of tensions and counterforces, desires and resistances, aspirations entangled with identity in ways that cannot be cleanly separated. The Way of Ambition announces itself from its opening pages as a novel about what we want and what wanting costs us — and about the dangerous, exhilarating, frequently painful business of building a life worthy of our own deepest longings. Claude Heath has not yet arrived. But the space he is going to occupy in Charmian's world is already visible — charged, waiting, and full of everything that is about to happen.
Among the contents
"We want a new note in English music," said Charmian, in her clear and slightly authoritative voice. "The Hallelujah Chorus era has gone at last to join all the Victorian relics. And the nation is drifting musically. Of course we have a few composers who are being silly in the attempt to be original, and a few others who still believe that all the people can stand in the way of home-grown products is a ballad or a Te Deum. But what we want is an English composer with a soul. I'm getting quite sick of heads. They are bearable in literature. But when it comes to music, one's whole being clamors for more."
"I have heard a new note in English music," observed a middle-aged, bald and lively-looking man, who was sitting on the opposite side of the drawing-room in Berkeley Square.
"Oh, but, Max, you always—"
"An absolutely new note," interrupted Max Elliot with enthusiastic emphasis, turning to the man with the sarcastic mouth who had just spoken. "Your French blood makes you so inclined to incredulity, Paul, that you are incapable of believing anything but that I am carried away."
