The Magic Mountain (106 page)

And did not this animosity also play a role in the two dialecticians’ attitude toward Pieter Peeperkorn? Hans Castorp thought he noticed something of that, perhaps because he had expected it to be much worse and had been more than a little impatient to introduce the royal stammerer to his own two “viziers,” as he sometimes jokingly called them, and to study the effect. Mynheer did not seem quite as grand out in the open as in a closed room. The soft felt hat that he wore pulled down deep hid the white flames of hair and massive tracery of his brow and made his features look smaller, shrank them as it were; even his red nose lost some of its majesty. And he was less good at walking than standing. He took small steps and had a habit of letting the full weight of his great body, including the head, tilt toward the foot he had just put forward, which made him look more like a kindly, senile old man than a king. Although he always stood pulled up to full height, he did not usually walk that way, but compressed himself somehow. Even then, however, he towered over Herr Lodovico and was several heads taller than little Naphta; but that was not the only reason why his presence weighed so heavily—so overwhelmingly heavily, just as Hans Castorp had pictured it in his imagination—on the existence of the two political theorists.

So heavy was the weight that in comparison they seemed diminished, impaired—which not only the sly observer noticed, but also, without doubt, those involved, both the two frail hyperarticulate gentlemen and the grand stammerer himself. Peeperkorn certainly treated Naphta and Settembrini with courtesy and attention—with a respect that Hans Castorp would have called ironic, if the insight that irony and great stature are incompatible had not prevented him from doing so. Kings know nothing of irony—not even when employed as an honest device of classical rhetoric, not to mention its more complicated forms. And so the Dutchman’s behavior toward Hans’s friends was characterized by what might better be called a refined, but grand mockery, sometimes hidden under slightly exaggerated seriousness, sometimes quite open. “Yes-yes-yes-yes!” he might say, waving an admonishing finger at them, while turning his head away with a droll smile playing on his ragged lips. “That is—those are—Gentlemen, let me call your attention to—cerebrum, cerebral, you understand. No—no, agreed, extraordinary, that is, it just goes to show—” They took their revenge by exchanging glances—their eyes would meet and then turn heavenward in despair—and even attempted to draw Hans Castorp into the game; he, however, refused.

There came a day when Herr Settembrini directly confronted his pupil, and so betrayed his own pedagogic uneasiness. “But in God’s name, my good engineer, he is just a stupid old man. What do you see in him? Can he do anything for you? It is beyond all reason. It would be clear enough—though not necessarily praiseworthy—if you were simply taking him into the bargain, if in seeking out his company you were seeking out that of his current sweetheart. But it is impossible not to notice that you pay almost more attention to him than to her. I implore you, help me understand this.”

Hans Castorp laughed. “By all means,” he said. “Agreed! The fact is, as we know—permit me to say—fine!” And he tried to ape Peeperkorn’s cultured gestures as well. “Yes, yes,” he said, and laughed again. “You find that stupid, Herr Settembrini, and certainly it is vague, which in your eyes is worse than stupid. Ah, stupidity. There are so many different kinds of stupidity, and cleverness is one of the worst. Hello! Why, I think I’ve just coined a phrase, a
bon mot
. How do you like it?”

“Very much. I cannot wait for your first collection of aphorisms. Perhaps there is still time, however, to ask you to take into account certain observations we have occasionally made concerning the misanthropic nature of paradoxes.”

“It shall be done, Herr Settembrini. Absolutely—shall be done. No, in this
bon mot
of mine, you do not see me in hot pursuit of paradoxes. I was merely trying to point out the great difficulty one has in defining ‘stupidity’ and ‘cleverness.’ It is so hard to keep them separate, they are so intertwined. I know very well how you hate any sort of mystical
guazzabuglio
and are a man who believes in values and judgments—value judgments—and I quite agree with you. But the issue of ‘stupidity’ and ‘cleverness’ is at times a complete mystery, and it must be permissible to concern oneself with mysteries, always presuming it is an honest attempt to get to the bottom of them, if possible. Let me ask you this question: Can you deny that he has us all in his pocket? I’m putting it crudely, and yet, as nearly as I can tell, you cannot deny it. He puts us in his pocket, and somehow or other he has the right to make fun of us all. But why? And how? And where does it come from? It is certainly not a matter of his cleverness. One can hardly speak of cleverness in this case, I admit. He is much more a man of fuzziness and feelings, feelings are his cup of tea, so to speak—if you’ll forgive me the colloquial phrase. What I am saying is this: it is not by way of cleverness that he puts us in his pocket, not through intellectual prowess. You wouldn’t stand for that. And it really is out of the question. But surely it is not physical prowess, either! It cannot be because of his broad captain’s shoulders, or any raw brute force, or because he could lay any one of us flat with his fist—it would never occur to him that he could, and if it did, why, a few civilized words would calm him down. And so it’s not physical, either. And yet the physical dimension does play a role, without a doubt—not in the sense of brute strength, but in another, more mystical sense—the moment anything physical plays a role, things always get mystical. And the physical merges into the intellectual, and vice versa, and cannot be differentiated, and stupidity and cleverness cannot be differentiated. But the effect is there, the dynamic effect, and we find ourselves stuck in his pocket. And for that we have only one word at hand, and that word is ‘personality.’ We use the word in another, perfectly reasonable sense, too: we are all personalities—moral and legal and all those other sorts of personalities. But that is not what I mean. I’m talking about a mystery that extends beyond stupidity and cleverness, and that is what we need to concern ourselves with—partly to get to the bottom of it, if possible, and partly, to the extent that it is not possible, to edify ourselves. And if you are for values, then, in the end, personality is a positive value, too, I should think—a more positive value than stupidity or cleverness, positive in the highest degree,
absolutely
positive, like life itself—in short, a value for life and in that sense suitable for our earnest consideration. And that’s how I thought I should respond to what you said about stupidity.”

Of late, Hans Castorp no longer got tangled up and confused during such gushings. He did not get stuck, but said his piece to the end, came to a full stop, lowering his voice and going his way like a man—although he always blushed and was actually somewhat afraid of the critical lull. that would follow his own silence and give him time to feel embarrassed.

Herr Settembrini let silence reign. Then he said, “You deny that you are in hot pursuit of paradoxes. By now you should know that I have an equal dislike of seeing you in hot pursuit of mysteries. By turning personality into an enigma, you run the danger of idol-worship. You are venerating a mask. You see something mystical where there is only mystification, one of those hollow counterfeits with which the demon of corporeal physiognomy enjoys taunting us on occasion. You have never spent any time in theatrical circles, have you? So you do not know those thespian faces that can embody the features of a Julius Caesar, a Goethe, and a Beethoven all in one, but whose owners, the moment they open their mouths, prove to be the most miserable ninnies under the sun.”

“Fine, a freak of nature,” Hans Castorp said. “And yet not just a freak, not just something to taunt us. For people to be actors, they must have talent, and talent is something that goes beyond stupidity and cleverness, it is itself a value for life. Mynheer Peeperkorn has talent, too, no matter what you may say, and he uses it to put us in his pocket. Set Herr Naphta in the corner of a room and have him deliver a lecture on Gregory the Great and the City of God, something well worth listening to—and in the other corner have Peeperkorn stand there with his strange mouth and a brow raised in great creases and say nothing except, ‘By all means! Permit me to say—settled!’ And you will see people gather around Peeperkorn, down to the last man, and Naphta will be left sitting there alone with his cleverness and his City of God, although he can express himself so clearly that it makes your blood and spit run cold, to use one of Behrens’s phrases.”

“You should be ashamed of yourself, worshiping success like that,” Herr Settembrini chided him. “
Mundus vult decipi
. I do not demand that people flock around Herr Naphta. He is a dreadful obstructionist. But I would be inclined to stand at his side in the imaginary scene you have just painted with such reprehensible relish. Go ahead and despise distinctions, precision, logic, the coherence of the human word. Go ahead and despise it in favor of some sort of hocus-pocus of insinuation and emotional charlatanry—and the Devil will definitely have you in his—”

“But I assure you, he can speak coherently when he warms to his topic,” Hans Castorp said. “He once told me about dynamic drugs and poisonous Asian trees, and it was so interesting it was almost eerie—interesting things are always a little eerie—and yet it was interesting not in and of itself, but actually only in connection with the effect of his personality. That was what made it both eerie and interesting at the same time.”

“Of course, your weakness for things Asian is well known. And indeed I cannot treat you to such wonders,” Herr Settembrini replied, and with such bitterness that Hans Castorp quickly explained that the benefits of the Italian’s conversation and teaching were to be found in an entirely different arena, of course, and no one would even think of making comparisons that would be unfair to both parties.

Herr Settembrini, however, ignored and scorned this bit of courtesy. “In any case,” he continued, “one can only admire your businesslike composure, my good engineer. It borders on the grotesque, you must admit. As things stand—well, your dunderhead has stolen your Beatrice. I call a spade a spade. And what do you do? It is unprecedented.”

“A difference in temperament, Herr Settembrini. A difference having to do with the heat of one’s blood, one’s sense of chivalry. Of course, as a man of the South, you would probably suggest poison or a dagger or at the least shape the matter along social and emotional lines, in short, have me play cock of the walk. That would be very manly of me, to be sure, socially masculine and gallant. But I see it differently. I am not at all manly in the sense that I regard other men as my rivals in courting—perhaps I am not masculine at all, but most certainly not in the sense that I automatically termed ‘social,’ although I don’t really know why. I ask my sluggish heart if there is anything I can reproach him for. Did he knowingly wrong me? Insults must be done with intention, or they are not insults. And as for ‘wrong’—why, there I should have to turn to
her
, which I certainly have no right to do, none at all, and most especially not in regard to Peeperkorn. Because first of all, he is a personality, which means something to women in and of itself, and second, he is not a civilian like me, but a kind of military man, like my poor cousin. What I mean is, he has a
point d’honneur
, honor is his cup of tea, and that is a matter of feeling, of life. I’m talking nonsense, I know, but I would rather babble away and at least partially express something difficult than reproduce impeccable clichés. That is perhaps a military trait in my own character, if I may say so.”

“Say it in any case,” Settembrini replied with a nod. “That would definitely be a trait one might praise. The courage of self-recognition and expression—that is literature, that is humanity.”

And so they parted on satisfactory terms on this occasion; Herr Settembrini brought the exchange to a conciliatory conclusion, and had good reason for doing so. His position was certainly not so inviolable that he could afford to push the limits of such rigor; a conversation about jealousy put him on rather slippery ground. At some point he would have had to admit that, given his pedagogic streak, his own masculinity was not of a strictly social, cock-of-the-walk nature, either, which explained why the grand Peeperkorn was as much a disruption to his meditations as were Naphta and Frau Chauchat; and finally, he could not hope to disabuse his pupil of the effects of a personality and superior nature, effects from which neither he nor his partner in cerebral matters was able to exclude himself.

The two of them did best when intellectual breezes blew, when they debated and could capture the attention of the strollers with one of their elegant, passionate, academic arguments (though the tone of voice implied that it was one of the most burning questions of the day, of life itself) the burden of which they more or less carried alone, thereby neutralizing for its duration the presence of the man of “stature,” who could offer only a brow creased in astonishment and some vague mocking scraps of commentary. But even under such circumstances, his weight was felt; he cast a shadow over the conversation, until it seemed to lose its brilliance, to forfeit its very substance somehow. His was a counterforce that they all could feel, but of which he was surely not even aware, or aware to God only knew what extent; but its weight was of no use to either argument, so that the issue itself seemed to pale, to lose its critical importance, indeed—though we hesitate to say it—to take on the stamp of frivolity. Or, to put it another way: their life-and-death duel of wits was constantly establishing some son of subterranean connection to this epitome of stature strolling beside them and was enervated by its magnetism. There is no other way to characterize this mysterious process, so very annoying to the debaters. One can only say that, had there not been a Pieter Peeperkorn, the others would have felt much more constrained to take sides, when, for example, Leo Naphta defended the fundamental, archrevolutionary nature of the Church against the teachings of Herr Settembrini, who asserted that her sole historical purpose had been to serve as the patron of the dark forces of inertia and reaction and then went on to claim that the affirmation of life and a future open to revolution and renewal was bound up with the opposing principles of enlightenment, science, and progress, which had arisen in the glorious epoch that witnessed the rebirth of classical education—and drove home this profession of faith with gestures and a burst of eloquence. Whereupon Naphta felt obliged to offer cold, caustic proof—and his proof was almost blindingly incontrovertible—that the Church was the embodiment of the religious, ascetic ideal, and at her core not even remotely an advocate or supporter of forces whose concern was to maintain themselves: worldly education and civil authority, for instance; rather, from time immemorial the Church had inscribed radical overthrow upon her banner—destruction, root and branch. Everything that presumed itself worth preserving and that the pallid, cowardly, conservative bourgeoisie attempted to preserve—state and family, worldly an and science—had always stood in conscious or unconscious opposition to the religious ideal, to the Church, whose innate tendency and unswerving goal was the dissolution of the existing world order and the remaking of society on the model of an ideal, communistic City of God.