Читать книгу The Holy Sinner - Thomas Mann - Страница 3

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The ringing of bells, the surging and swelling of bells supra urbem, above the whole city, in its airs overfilled with sound. Bells, bells, they swing and sway, they wag and weave through their whole arc on their beams, in their seats, hundred-voiced, in Babylonish confusion. Slow and swift, blaring and booming—there is neither measure nor harmony, they talk all at once and all together, they break in even on themselves; on clang the clappers and leave no time for the excited metal to din itself out, for like a pendulum they are already back at the other edge, droning into its own droning; so that when echo still resounds: ‘In te Domine speravi,’ it is uttering already ‘Beati quorum tecta sunt peccata’ into its own midst; not only so, but lesser bells tinkle clear from smaller shrines, as though the mass-boy might be touching the little bell of the Host.

Ringing from the height and ringing from the depths; from the seven arch-holy places of pilgrimage and all the churches of the seven parishes on both sides of the twice-rounding Tiber. From the Aventine ringing; from the holy places of the Palatine and from St John of the Lateran; above the grave of him who bears the keys, in the Vatican Hill, from Santa Maria Maggiore, Santa Maria in Foro, in Domnica, in Cosmedin, and in Trastevere; from Ara-Coeli, St Paul’s outside the Walls, St Peter in Chains, and from the basilica of the Most Holy Cross in Jerusalem. And from the chapels in the cemeteries, from the roofs of the basilicas and oratories in the narrow streets come the sounds as well. Who names their names and knows their titles? As when the wind, when the tempest rakes the strings of the aeolian harp and rouses the whole world of sound, the far apart and the close at hand, in whirring, sweeping harmony; such, translated in bronze, are the sounds that split the air, for here everything that is rings for the great feast and high procession.

Who is ringing the bells? Not the bell-ringers. They have run into the streets like all the folk, to list the uncanny ringing. Convince yourselves: the bell-chambers are empty. Lax hang the ropes, and yet the bells rock and the clappers clang. Shall one say that nobody rings them?—No, only an ungrammatical head, without logic, would be capable of the utterance. ‘The bells are ringing’: that means they are rung, and let the bell-chambers be never so empty.—So who is ringing the bells of Rome?—It is the spirit of story-telling.—Then can he be everywhere, hic et ubique, for instance at once on the Tower of St George in Velabro and up in Santa Sabina, which preserves columns from the abominable Temple of Diana? At a hundred consecrate seats at once?—Of a certainty, that he can. He is as air, bodiless, ubiquitous, not subject to distinctions of here and there. He it is that says: ‘All the bells were ringing’; and, in consequence, it is he who rings them. So spiritual is this spirit and so abstract that grammatically he can be talked of only in the third person and simply referred to as ‘It is he’. And yet he can gather himself into a person, namely into the first person, and be incarnate in somebody who speaks in him and says: ‘I am he. I am the spirit of story-telling, who, sitting in his time-place, namely in the library of the cloister of St Gall in Alemannenland, where once Notker the Stammerer sat, tells this story for entertainment and exceptional edification; in that I begin with its grace-abounding end and ring the bells of Rome: id est, report that on that day of processional entry they all together began to ring of themselves.’

But also, in order that the second grammatical person should come into its own, the question runs: Who art thou then, who saying I sits at Notker’s desk and embodies the spirit of narrative?—I am Clemens the Irishman, ordinis divi Benedicti, visiting here as Brother, accepted guest, and envoy from my Abbot Kilian of the cloister of Clonmacnoise, my house in Ireland, that I may foster the ancient relations which since the days of St Gall and St Columbanus obtain between my house and this strong citadel of Christ. I have on my journey visited a great many seats of pious learning and abodes of the Muses, such as Fulda, Reichenau, and Gandersheim, St Emeran in Regensburg, Lorsch, Echternach, and Corvey. But here, where the eye laves itself in evangeliaries and psalters with such priceless illumination in gold and in silver set on purple, with decoration in vermilion, green, and blue; where the Brothers under their choirmaster intone more sweetly than ever elsewhere heard; where the bodily refection is excellent, not forgetting the cordial little wine which is poured out with it, and after table in the cloisters one can exercise so agreeably round the fountain; here I have made my station for a somewhat more spacious time, occupying one of the always ready guest-cells into which the highly estimable Abbot, Gozbert of his name, had thoughtfully put an Irish cross, whereon one sees figured a lamb in the coils of snakes, the arbor vitae, a dragon’s head with the cross in his jaws, and the ecclesia catching the blood of Christ in a chalice, whilst the devil tries to snap up a bite and sup of it. The piece witnesses the early high standard of our Irish arts.

I am deeply attached to my home, St Patric’s nook-shotten isle, its meadows, heaths, and moors. Its airs blow damp and mild, and mild too is the air in our cloister of Clonmacnoise, given as it is to training disciplined by a measured asceticism. With our Abbot Killian I am of the well-tried view that the religion of Jesus and the practice of ancient studies must go hand in hand in combating rude ways; that it is the same ignorance which knows nothing of the one and of the other, and that where the first took root the other also flourished. In fact the height of culture reached by our brotherhood in my experience quite considerably surpassed that of the Roman clerus itself, which is often all too little touched by the wisdom of antiquity and among whose members at times a truly lamentable Latin is written—if also none so bad as among German monks, one of whom, to be sure an Augustinian, lately wrote to me: ‘Habes tibi aliqua secreta dicere. Robustissimus in corpore sum et saepe propterea temptationibus Diaboli succumbo.’ That is indeed scarcely tolerable, stylistically as well as also in other ways, and probably such peasantly rubbish could never flow from a Roman pen. Altogether it would be mistaken to believe I would speak ill of Rome and its supremacy, whose loyal adherent on the contrary I profess myself. It may be that we Irish monks, who have always held to independent dealings and in many regions of the Continent have first preached Christianity, have also acquired extraordinary merit in that everywhere, in Burgundy and Friesland, Thuringia and Alemannia, we erected cloisters as bastions of the faith and of our mission. That does not mean that we have not since early times recognized the Bishop in the Lateran as head of the Christian Church and seen in him a being of almost divine nature, in that we consider at most only the site of the divine resurrection as holier than St Peter’s. One may say without untruth that the churches of Jerusalem, Ephesus, and Antioch are older than the Roman, and if Peter, at whose unassailable name one does not gladly think of certain cockcrows, founded the bishopric of Rome (he did found it), the same is indisputably true of the community of Antioch. But these matters can only play the role of fugitive comments at the margin of truth: that, firstly, our Lord and Saviour (as it stands in Matthew and may be read there, though indeed only in him) summoned Peter to be his vicar here below, but the latter transferred the vicariate to the Roman bishop and conferred on him the precedence over all the episcopates of the world. We even read indeed in decretals and protocols of early time the very speech which the apostle himself held at the ordination of his first successor, Pope Linus, which I regard as a real trial of faith and a challenge to the spirit to manifest its power and show what all it succeeds in believing.

In my so much more humble quality as incarnation of the spirit of story-telling, I have every interest that others like me shall regard the call to the sella gestatoria as the highest and most blessed of elections. And it is at once a sign of my devotion to Rome that I bear the name of Clemens. For natively I am named Morhold. But I have never liked the name, it strikes me as wild and heathenish, and with the cowl I put on that of the third successor of Peter, so that it is no longer the vulgar Morhold who moves in the girded tunic and scapular but a more refined Clemens, who has consummated what St Paul to the Ephesians so happily called the ‘putting on a new man’. Yes, it is no longer at all the body of flesh which went about in the doublet of that Morhold, but rather a spiritual one which the cingulum girds—accordingly, a body which makes not quite worthy of sanction my earlier statement: id est, that I am the ‘incarnate spirit of story-telling’, namely that it is ‘embodied’ in me. I do not care for this word ‘embodiment’ so much, since (of course) it derives from the body and the fleshly shape, which together with the name of Morhold I have put off, and which in all ways is a domain of Satan, through him capable of abominations and subject to them, though one scarcely understands why it does not reject them. On the other hand, the body is the vehicle of the soul and God-given reason, without which these would be deprived of their basis; and so one must regard the body as a necessary evil. Such is the recognition fitting to it; one more enthusiastic we owe it not, in its urgent need and its repulsiveness. And how should one, in act to relate a tale, or to retell it (for it has already been told, even several times, if also inadequately), which abounds in bodily abomination and affords frightful evidence to what all the body gives itself, without fear or faltering—how should one be inclined to boast overmuch about being an embodiment?

No; for the spirit of story-telling, having concentrated itself in my monkish person, called Clemens the Irishman, has preserved much of that abstraction which enables it to ring from all the titular basilicas of the city at once; two instances of the fact I will cite straightway. Firstly, then, it may escape the reader of this manuscript, and yet it is worthy of remark, that I have inscribed it with the name of the place where I sit, namely St Gall, at Notker’s desk, but that I have not said in what times, in how-manyeth year and century after our Saviour’s birth I sit here and cover the parchment with my small, fine scholarly, and decorative script. For there is no fixed term, and also the name of our Abbot here, Gozbert, does not furnish one. For it repeats itself all too oft in time, and, when one would cite it, turns quite readily into Fridolin or Hartmut. If one ask me, teasingly or maliciously, whether I myself indeed know where I am but not when, I answer pleasantly: there is truly nothing to know, for as a personification of the spirit of story-telling I rejoice in that abstraction, the second instance of which I now give.

For now I begin to write and address myself to tell a tale at once frightful and highly edifying. But it is quite uncertain in what language I write, whether Latin, French, German, or Anglo-Saxon, and indeed it is all the same; for say I write Thiudisch, such as the Germans speak who live in Helvetia, then tomorrow British stands on the paper and it is a Breton book that I have written. By no means do I assert that I possess all the tongues; but they run all together in my writing and become one—in other words, language. For the thing is so, that the spirit of narration is free to the point of abstraction, whose medium is language in and for itself, language itself, which sets itself as absolute and does not greatly care about idioms and national linguistic gods. That indeed would be polytheistic and pagan. God is spirit, and above languages is language.

One thing is certain: that I write prose and not little verses, for which on the whole I cherish no exaggerated regard. Rather in this respect I am in the tradition of the Emperor Carolus, who was not only a great lawgiver and judge of the nations but also the protector of grammar and an assiduous patron of correct and limpid prose. I hear said, indeed, that only metre and rhyme can result in a strict form, but I would like well to know why this hopping on three or four iambic feet, resulting to boot in all sorts of stumbling in dactyls and anapaests, with a little lighthearted assonance of the end words, is supposed to indicate the strict form, as against a shapely prose with its much finer and less obvious rhythmical laws. If I were to begin with:

There was a prince by name Grimald,

He had a stroke that laid him cold.

He left behind twinn children fair—

Aha, was that a sinful pair

or something in that kind, would it be a stricter form than the grammatical and dignified prose in which I now present my tale of grace, that many who come after, French, Angles, and Germans, may dip into it to make their little rimes?

So much by way of preface; I begin as follows: