姐,我要。。。
轻松的小说阅读环境
巴黎圣母院英文版 - BOOK FIFTH CHAPTER II.THIS WILL KILL THAT. Page 2
繁体
恢复默认
返回目录【键盘操作】左右光标键:上下章节;回车键:目录;双击鼠标:停止/启动自动滚动;滚动时上下光标键调节滚动速度。
  And when one observes that this mode of expression is not only the most conservative, but also the most simple, the most convenient, the most practicable for all; when one reflects that it does not drag after it bulky baggage, and does not set in motion a heavy apparatus; when one compares thought forced, in order to transform itself into an edifice, to put in motion four or five other arts and tons of gold, a whole mountain of stones, a whole forest of timber-work, a whole nation of workmen; when one compares it to the thought which becomes a book, and for which a little paper, a little ink, and a pen suffice,--how can one be surprised that human intelligence should have quitted architecture for printing? Cut the primitive bed of a river abruptly with a canal hollowed out below its level, and the river will desert its bed.Behold how, beginning with the discovery of printing, architecture withers away little by little, becomes lifeless and bare.How one feels the water sinking, the sap departing, the thought of the times and of the people withdrawing from it!The chill is almost imperceptible in the fifteenth century; the press is, as yet, too weak, and, at the most, draws from powerful architecture a superabundance of life.But practically beginning with the sixteenth century, the malady of architecture is visible; it is no longer the expression of society; it becomes classic art in a miserable manner; from being Gallic, European, indigenous, it becomes Greek and Roman; from being true and modern, it becomes pseudo-classic.It is this decadence which is called the Renaissance.A magnificent decadence, however, for the ancient Gothic genius, that sun which sets behind the gigantic press of Mayence, still penetrates for a while longer with its rays that whole hybrid pile of Latin arcades and Corinthian columns.It is that setting sun which we mistake for the dawn.Nevertheless, from the moment when architecture is no longer anything but an art like any other; as soon as it is no longer the total art, the sovereign art, the tyrant art,--it has no longer the power to retain the other arts.So they emancipate themselves, break the yoke of the architect, and take themselves off, each one in its own direction.Each one of them gains by this divorce.Isolation aggrandizes everything. Sculpture becomes statuary, the image trade becomes painting, the canon becomes music.One would pronounce it an empire dismembered at the death of its Alexander, and whose provinces become kingdoms.Hence Raphael, Michael Angelo, Jean Goujon, palestrina, those splendors of the dazzling sixteenth century.Thought emancipates itself in all directions at the same time as the arts.The arch-heretics of the Middle Ages had already made large incisions into Catholicism.The sixteenth century breaks religious unity.Before the invention of printing, reform would have been merely a schism; printing converted it into a revolution.Take away the press; heresy is enervated. Whether it be providence or Fate, Gutenburg is the precursor of Luther.Nevertheless, when the sun of the Middle Ages is completely set, when the Gothic genius is forever extinct upon the horizon, architecture grows dim, loses its color, becomes more and more effaced.The printed book, the gnawing worm of the edifice, sucks and devours it.It becomes bare, denuded of its foliage, and grows visibly emaciated.It is petty, it is poor, it is nothing.It no longer expresses anything, not even the memory of the art of another time.Reduced to itself, abandoned by the other arts, because human thought is abandoning it, it summons bunglers in place of artists.Glass replaces the painted windows.The stone-cutter succeeds the sculptor. Farewell all sap, all originality, all life, all intelligence. It drags along, a lamentable workshop mendicant, from copy to copy.Michael Angelo, who, no doubt, felt even in the sixteenth century that it was dying, had a last idea, an idea of despair.That Titan of art piled the pantheon on the parthenon, and made Saint-peter's at Rome.A great work, which deserved to remain unique, the last originality of architecture, the signature of a giant artist at the bottom of the colossal register of stone which was closed forever.With Michael Angelo dead, what does this miserable architecture, which survived itself in the state of a spectre, do?It takes Saint-peter in Rome, copies it and parodies it.It is a mania. It is a pity.Each century has its Saint-peter's of Rome; in the seventeenth century, the Val-de-Grace; in the eighteenth, Sainte-Geneviève.Each country has its Saint-peter's of Rome.London has one; petersburg has another; paris has two or three.The insignificant testament, the last dotage of a decrepit grand art falling back into infancy before it dies.If, in place of the characteristic monuments which we have just described, we examine the general aspect of art from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, we notice the same phenomena of decay and phthisis.Beginning with Fran?ois II., the architectural form of the edifice effaces itself more and more, and allows the geometrical form, like the bony structure of an emaciated invalid, to become prominent.The fine lines of art give way to the cold and inexorable lines of geometry.An edifice is no longer an edifice; it is a polyhedron.Meanwhile, architecture is tormented in her struggles to conceal this nudity.Look at the Greek pediment inscribed upon the Roman pediment, and vice versa.It is still the pantheon on the parthenon: Saint-peter's of Rome.Here are the brick houses of Henri IV., with their stone corners; the place Royale, the place Dauphine.Here are the churches of Louis XIII., heavy, squat, thickset, crowded together, loaded with a dome like a hump.Here is the Mazarin architecture, the wretched Italian pasticcio of the Four Nations. Here are the palaces of Louis XIV., long barracks for courtiers, stiff, cold, tiresome.Here, finally, is Louis XV., with chiccory leaves and vermicelli, and all the warts, and all the fungi, which disfigure that decrepit, toothless, and coquettish old architecture.From Fran?ois II. to Louis XV., the evil has increased in geometrical progression.Art has no longer anything but skin upon its bones.It is miserably perishing.Meanwhile what becomes of printing?All the life which is leaving architecture comes to it.In proportion as architecture ebbs, printing swells and grows.That capital of forces which human thought had been expending in edifices, it henceforth expends in books.Thus, from the sixteenth century onward, the press, raised to the level of decaying architecture, contends with it and kills it.In the seventeenth century it is already sufficiently the sovereign, sufficiently triumphant, sufficiently established in its victory, to give to the world the feast of a great literary century.In the eighteenth, having reposed for a long time at the Court of Louis XIV., it seizes again the old sword of Luther, puts it into the hand of Voltaire, and rushes impetuously to the attack of that ancient Europe, whose architectural expression it has already killed.At the moment when the eighteenth century comes to an end, it has destroyed everything. In the nineteenth, it begins to reconstruct.Now, we ask, which of the three arts has really represented human thought for the last three centuries? which translates it? which expresses not only its literary and scholastic vagaries, but its vast, profound, universal movement? which constantly superposes itself, without a break, without a gap, upon the human race, which walks a monster with a thousand legs?--Architecture or printing?It is printing.Let the reader make no mistake; architecture is dead; irretrievably slain by the printed book,--slain because it endures for a shorter time,--slain because it costs more.Every cathedral represents millions.Let the reader now imagine what an investment of funds it would require to rewrite the architectural book; to cause thousands of edifices to swarm once more upon the soil; to return to those epochs when the throng of monuments was such, according to the statement of an eye witness, "that one would have said that the world in shaking itself, had cast off its old garments in order to cover itself with a white vesture of churches." ~Erat enim ut si mundus, ipse excutiendo semet, rejecta vetustate, candida ecclesiarum vestem indueret~.(GLABER RADOLpHUS.)A book is so soon made, costs so little, and can go so far! How can it surprise us that all human thought flows in this channel?This does not mean that architecture will not still have a fine monument, an isolated masterpiece, here and there.We may still have from time to time, under the reign of printing, a column made I suppose, by a whole army from melted cannon, as we had under the reign of architecture, Iliads and Romanceros, Mahabahrata, and Nibelungen Lieds, made by a whole people, with rhapsodies piled up and melted together.The great accident of an architect of genius may happen in the twentieth century, like that of Dante in the thirteenth.But architecture will no longer be the social art, the collective art, the dominating art.The grand poem, the grand edifice, the grand work of humanity will no longer be built: it will be printed.And henceforth, if architecture should arise again accidentally, it will no longer be mistress.It will be subservient to the law of literature, which formerly received the law from it.The respective positions of the two arts will be inverted.It is certain that in architectural epochs, the poems, rare it is true, resemble the monuments.In India, Vyasa is branching, strange, impenetrable as a pagoda.In Egyptian Orient, poetry has like the edifices, grandeur and tranquillity of line; in antique Greece, beauty, serenity, calm; in Christian Europe, the Catholic majesty, the popular naivete, the rich and luxuriant vegetation of an epoch of renewal. The Bible resembles the pyramids; the Iliad, the parthenon; Homer, phidias.Dante in the thirteenth century is the last Romanesque church; Shakespeare in the sixteenth, the last Gothic cathedral.Thus, to sum up what we have hitherto said, in a fashion which is necessarily incomplete and mutilated, the human race has two books, two registers, two testaments: masonry and printing; the Bible of stone and the Bible of paper.No doubt, when one contemplates these two Bibles, laid so broadly open in the centuries, it is permissible to regret the visible majesty of the writing of granite, those gigantic alphabets formulated in colonnades, in pylons, in obelisks, those sorts of human mountains which cover the world and the past, from the pyramid to the bell tower, from Cheops to Strasburg. The past must be reread upon these pages of marble.This book, written by architecture, must be admired and perused incessantly; but the grandeur of the edifice which printing erects in its turn must not be denied.That edifice is colossal.Some compiler of statistics has calculated, that if all the volumes which have issued from the press since Gutenberg's day were to be piled one upon another, they would fill the space between the earth and the moon; but it is not that sort of grandeur of which we wished to speak.Nevertheless, when one tries to collect in one's mind a comprehensive image of the total products of printing down to our own days, does not that total appear to us like an immense construction, resting upon the entire world, at which humanity toils without relaxation, and whose monstrous crest is lost in the profound mists of the future?It is the anthill of intelligence.It is the hive whither come all imaginations, those golden bees, with their honey.The edifice has a thousand stories.Here and there one beholds on its staircases the gloomy caverns of science which pierce its interior.Everywhere upon its surface, art causes its arabesques, rosettes, and laces to thrive luxuriantly before the eyes.There, every individual work, however capricious and isolated it may seem, has its place and its projection. Harmony results from the whole.From the cathedral of Shakespeare to the mosque of Byron, a thousand tiny bell towers are piled pell-mell above this metropolis of universal thought.At its base are written some ancient titles of humanity which architecture had not registered.To the left of the entrance has been fixed the ancient bas-relief, in white marble, of Homer; to the right, the polyglot Bible rears its seven heads.The hydra of the Romancero and some other hybrid forms, the Vedas and the Nibelungen bristle further on.Nevertheless, the prodigious edifice still remains incomplete. The press, that giant machine, which incessantly pumps all the intellectual sap of society, belches forth without pause fresh materials for its work.The whole human race is on the scaffoldings.Each mind is a mason.The humblest fills his hole, or places his stone.Retif dè le Bretonne brings his hod of plaster.Every day a new course rises.Independently of the original and individual contribution of each writer, there are collective contingents.The eighteenth century gives the _Encyclopedia_, the revolution gives the _Moniteur_.Assuredly, it is a construction which increases and piles up in endless spirals; there also are confusion of tongues, incessant activity, indefatigable labor, eager competition of all humanity, refuge promised to intelligence, a new Flood against an overflow of barbarians.It is the second tower of Babel of the human race.
或许您还会喜欢:
看不见的城市
作者:佚名
章节:18 人气:2
摘要:第一章马可·波罗描述他旅途上经过的城市的时候,忽必烈汗不一定完全相信他的每一句话,但是鞑靼皇帝听取这个威尼斯青年的报告,的确比听别些使者或考察员的报告更专心而且更有兴趣。在帝王的生活中,征服别人的土地而使版图不断扩大,除了带来骄傲之外,跟着又会感觉寂寞而又松弛,因为觉悟到不久便会放弃认识和了解新领土的念头。 [点击阅读]
科学怪人
作者:佚名
章节:29 人气:2
摘要:你那时还觉得我的探险之旅会凶多吉少,但是现在看来开端良好、一帆风顺,你对此一定会深感宽慰吧。我是昨天抵达这里的,所做的第一件事就是要写信给你,让我亲爱的姐姐放心,而且请你对我的探险事业增加成功的信心。我现在位于距离伦敦千里之遥的北方,当我漫步在圣彼得堡的街头,微风带着一丝寒气迎面而来,不觉令我精神一振,一种快意不禁涌上心头。 [点击阅读]
空幻之屋
作者:佚名
章节:30 人气:2
摘要:星期五的早晨,六点十三分,露西.安格卡特尔睁开了她那蓝色的大眼睛,新的一天开始了。同往常一样,她立刻就完全清醒了,并且开始思考从她那活跃得令人难以置信的头脑中冒出来的问题。她感到迫切需要同别人商量,于是想到了自己年轻的表妹米奇.哈德卡斯尔,昨天晚上才来到空幻庄园的年轻人。安格卡特尔夫人迅速地溜下床,往她那依然优雅的肩头披上一件便服后,就来到了米奇的房间。 [点击阅读]
第八日的蝉
作者:佚名
章节:57 人气:2
摘要:握住门把。手心如握寒冰。那种冰冷,仿佛在宣告已无退路。希和子知道平日上午八点十分左右,这间屋子会有大约二十分钟没锁门。她知道只有婴儿被留在屋里,无人在家。就在刚才,希和子躲在自动贩卖机后面目送妻子与丈夫一同出门。希和子毫不犹豫,转动冰冷的门把。门一开,烤焦的面包皮皮、油、廉价粉底、柔软精、尼古丁、湿抹布……那些混杂在一起的味道扑面而来,稍微缓和了室外的寒意。 [点击阅读]
苹果树
作者:佚名
章节:12 人气:2
摘要:“那苹果树、那歌声和那金子。”墨雷译《攸里披底斯的〈希波勒特斯〉》在他们的银婚日,艾舍斯特和妻子坐着汽车,行驶在荒原的外边,要到托尔基去过夜,圆满地结束这个节日,因为那里是他们初次相遇的地方。这是斯苔拉·艾舍斯特的主意,在她的性格里是有点儿多情色彩的。 [点击阅读]
茨威格短篇小说集
作者:佚名
章节:26 人气:2
摘要:战争爆发前十年,我有一回在里维耶拉度假期,住在一所小公寓里。一天,饭桌上发生了一场激烈的辩论,渐渐转变成忿怒的争吵,几乎闹到结怨动武的地步,这真是万没料到的。世上的人大多数幻想能力十分迟钝,不论什么事情,若不直接牵涉到自己,若不象尖刺般狼狠地扎迸头脑里,他们决不会昂奋激动的,可是,一旦有点什么,哪怕十分微不足道,只要是明摆在眼前,直截了当地触动感觉,便立刻会使他们大动感情,往往超出应有的限度。 [点击阅读]
蝴蝶梦
作者:佚名
章节:39 人气:2
摘要:影片从梦中的女主人公---第一人称的'我'回忆往事开始。夜里,我又梦回曼陀丽。面对这堆被焚的中世纪建筑废墟,我又想起很多过去……那是从法国开始的。做为'陪伴'的我随范霍夫太太来到蒙特卡洛。一天,在海边我看到一个在陡崖边徘徊的男子。我以为他要投海,就叫出了声。他向我投来愤怒的一瞥。我知道我想错了,他可真是一个怪人。很巧,他竟同我们住在同一个饭店里。 [点击阅读]
质数的孤独
作者:佚名
章节:11 人气:2
摘要:爱丽丝·德拉·罗卡讨厌滑雪学校。她讨厌在圣诞假期也要一大早七点半就起床,她讨厌在吃早餐时父亲目不转睛地盯着她,同时一条腿在餐桌下面焦躁地抖个不停,仿佛在催促她说:“快吃!”她讨厌那条会扎她大腿的羊毛连裤袜,讨厌那双让她手指不能动弹的滑雪手套,讨厌那顶勒住她的面颊、同时又用铁带扣卡住她下巴的头盔,也讨厌那双特别挤脚、让她走起路来像只大猩猩的滑雪靴。“你到底喝不喝这杯奶?”父亲再一次逼问她。 [点击阅读]
迷恋
作者:佚名
章节:104 人气:2
摘要:“喂??…喂????”…嘟嘟…嘟嘟嘟…二零零三年,成南。…又来了…又来了,该死的骚扰电话,今天是十八岁的我的第十七个生日…是我喝海带汤的日子没错了,偏偏接到这狗屎味儿的无声电话…^=_=已经一个星期了,“喂…嘟,喂…嘟”(?誄每次都是一样)那边也不说话,就是偷听我的声音然后就断了…今天早晨我居然在生日餐桌上又被涮了一次…^-_-凭我出神入化的第六感, [点击阅读]
追忆似水年华
作者:佚名
章节:129 人气:2
摘要:《追忆逝水年华》是一部与传统小说不同的长篇小说。全书以叙述者“我”为主体,将其所见所闻所思所感融合一体,既有对社会生活,人情世态的真实描写,又是一份作者自我追求,自我认识的内心经历的记录。除叙事以外,还包含有大量的感想和议论。整部作品没有中心人物,没有完整的故事,没有波澜起伏,贯穿始终的情节线索。 [点击阅读]
邦斯舅舅
作者:佚名
章节:32 人气:2
摘要:一谈及巴尔扎克,人们首先会想到他的《高老头》、《欧叶妮·格朗台》、《幻灭》,而《邦斯舅舅》恐怕就要稍逊一筹了。然而,我们却读到了也许会令中国读者意外的评论。安德烈·纪德曾这样写道:“这也许是巴尔扎克众多杰作中我最喜欢的一部;不管怎么说,它是我阅读最勤的一部……我欣喜、迷醉……”他还写道:“不同凡响的《邦斯舅舅》,我先后读了三、四遍,现在我可以离开巴尔扎克了,因为再也没有比这本书更精彩的作品了。 [点击阅读]
阿加莎·克里斯蒂自传
作者:佚名
章节:11 人气:2
摘要:1我以为,人生最大的幸福莫过于有一个幸福的童年。我的童年幸福快乐。我有一个可爱的家庭和宅院,一位聪颖耐心的保姆;父母情意甚笃,是一对恩爱夫妻和称职的家长。回首往事,我感到家庭里充满了欢乐。这要归功于父亲,他为人随和。如今,人们不大看重随和的品性,注重的大多是某个男人是否机敏、勤奋,是否有益于社会,并且说话算数。至于父亲,公正地说,他是一位非常随和的人。这种随和给与他相处的人带来无尽的欢愉。 [点击阅读]