The Magic Mountain (107 page)

Herr Settembrini then took the floor, and by God, he knew how to make the most of it. How deplorable, he said, to confuse true Luciferian revolutionary thought with a general revolt of every bad instinct. Over the centuries, the Church’s love of innovation had consisted of Inquisitions, whose task was to throttle all life-affirming ideas, to suffocate them in the smoke of the stake; but nowadays she was sending out her emissaries to announce that she was all for upending things, that her goal was to replace freedom, education, and democracy with dictatorship of the mob and barbarism.
Eh, eh
—that was indeed a dreadful sort of contradictory consistency, a consistent contradiction.

His adversary, Naphta responded, showed no lack of the same contradictions and consistencies; he thought of himself as a democrat, and yet expressed himself as something less than a friend of the common man and equality, indeed displayed a reprehensible aristocratic arrogance by describing the world’s proletariat, who were called to provisional dictatorship, as a mob. But obviously he did behave like a real democrat when it came to the Church, which, as one proudly had to confess, represented the most noble force in human history—noble in the final and highest meaning of the word, nobility of the Spirit. For the ascetic Spirit—if he might be permitted a tautology—the Spirit that denied and destroyed the world, was nobility itself, the aristocratic principle in its purest form; it could never be popular, and indeed the Church had been essentially unpopular throughout the ages. If Herr Settembrini would bother to do a little research on the literature of the Middle Ages he would discover that fact: the people—taken in the widest sense—had always had a crude distaste for the Church and her ways, as evidenced, for example, in their regard for certain legendary monks, creations of popular fantasy, who opposed the ascetic ideal with wine, women, and song in a downright Luther-like fashion. Over time, all the instincts of worldly heroism, the cult of the warrior, even courtly poetry, had become more or less open in their opposition to the religious ideal, and thus to the hierarchy. For all that had been mere “world” and mob rule in comparison to the nobility of the Spirit represented by the Church.

Herr Settembrini thanked him for jogging his memory. The figure of the monk Ilsan in the epic
Rosengarten
contained a great many refreshing traits when compared with the graveyard aristocracy so highly praised here; and if he, Settembrini, was no friend of the German reformer to whom allusion had been made, they would nevertheless find him ready fervently to defend a doctrine based on democratic individualism against any sort of spiritual and feudal yearnings to dominate the personality.

“Oh my!” Naphta suddenly cried. Apparently the point was to suggest that the Church suffered from a lack of democracy and did not value human individuality, was that it? And what about the humane, unbiased character of canon law? Roman law made legal standing dependent upon citizenship; Germanic law, on one’s being a free man within the tribe. But canon law demanded only orthodoxy and membership in the ecclesiastical community and, casting aside all national and social considerations, allowed slaves and prisoners of war the right to bequeath and inherit property.

Such rights, Settembrini remarked cuttingly, were probably not maintained without a sidelong glance at the “canonical share,” which had to be subtracted from every will. And then he went on to speak of “clerical demagoguery,” of the absolute lust for power that condescended to rouse the denizens of the underworld when the gods quite understandably did not wish to hear from them, and suggested that the Church was apparently more concerned with the quantity than the quality of souls saved, which indicated a profound lack of spiritual nobility.

A lack of noble intent—the Church? Herr Settembrini’s attention was called to the implacable principle of aristocracy that lay behind the idea that shame can be inherited: the transference of major guilt to—democratically speaking—innocent offspring; the lifelong blemish attached to natural children, for example, including their lack of legal standing.

Naphta was told to be silent on that account—first, because it was an outrage to humane feelings, and second, because he, Settembrini, had heard enough evasions and could see through the tricks of his opponent’s apologetics to the thoroughly infamous and devilish cult of nihilism, which desired to be called Spirit and managed to perceive something legitimizing and sanctifying in the acknowledged unpopularity of the ascetic principle.

And at this Naphta begged them to forgive him for laughing out loud. The nihilism of the Church, had he said? The nihilism of the most realistic system for exercising authority in the history of the world? Could it be that Herr Settembrini had never been touched by that breath of humane irony with which the Church continually made concessions to the world, to the flesh, cleverly acquiescing in order to disguise the ultimate consequences of the ascetic principle and letting the influence of the Spirit establish order by not opposing nature all too sternly? And so he had never heard of the refined priestly concept of indulgence, under which even a sacrament was included—marriage, to be precise, which unlike the other sacraments was not a positive good, but a defense against sin, conferred solely to limit sensual desire and to instill moderation, so that the ascetic principle, the ideal of chastity, might be affirmed without defying the flesh with unpolitic severity?

How could Herr Settembrini not help inveighing against such an atrocious misuse of the idea of the “politic,” against this gesture of shrewd, conceited forbearance that the spirit—or what passed for spirit in this case—extended to its alleged guilty opposite, in the presumption that such “politic” action was necessary, when in truth no such noxious indulgence was required; he could not help castigating a damnable dualistic interpretation of the world that cursed the universe—in particular life itself and its fancied opposite, the spirit: for if the one was evil, then the other, as its pure negation, had to be evil as well. And he championed the innocence of lust—and Hans Castorp was reminded of that humanist’s spare garret with its lectern and rush-bottom chairs and water carafe; whereas Naphta, after first claiming that lust could never be without guilt and that nature should, if you please, have a bad conscience in the presence of the Spirit, went on to refute the nihilism of the ascetic principle by defining the Church’s policy of spiritual indulgence as “love”—and Hans Castorp found the word “love” sounded very odd coming from caustic, gaunt little Naphta.

And on and on it went, we know the game; Hans Castorp knew it, too. We listened along with him for a moment in order to observe, for instance, how such a peripatetic passage-at-arms might sound under the shadow of the personality strolling beside the combatants and how his presence might secretly enervate their struggle. And, indeed, a clandestine compulsion to take the presence of that personality into consideration killed the spark that normally leaped between the two—it was reminiscent of the dull, lifeless feeling that overcomes you when an electrical outlet turns out to be dead. Fine, that was that. Nothing crackled between the antagonists now, no lightning flashed, no current surged. The presence that intellect thought to neutralize, neutralized intellect instead. Hans Castorp observed it all with astonished curiosity.

Revolution and preservation—they looked to Peeperkorn as he trudged along with his hat pulled down low, hardly cutting a particularly grand figure as he tilted to one side with each step; they watched him jerk his head in jest toward the combatants, and heard those wide, irregular, ragged lips say: “Yes—yes—yes! Cerebrum, cerebral, you understand. That is—it just goes to show that—” And behold, the electrical outlet was dead as a doornail. They tried another one, resorted to stronger appeals, took up the issues of nobility, aristocracy, popularity. No spark. As if pulled by some magnetic force, the conversation turned personal. Hans Castorp pictured Clavdia’s traveling companion lying in bed under his red silk quilt, in his collarless woolen shirt, half old proletarian, half royal bust—and with a feeble twitch the nerve of the argument died. Turn up the voltage! Here, negation and the cult of nihilism—there, the eternal yes and the Spirit’s loving inclination toward life! But when you looked at Mynheer Peeperkorn—and the secret pull in his direction was irresistible—where was the nerve, the lightning flash, the current? In short, nothing happened, and that was, to use Hans’s term, no more and no less than a mystery. It was something for him to jot down for his collection of aphorisms: one either expresses a mystery in the simplest words, or not at all. And to express this one, if we must, the only thing to say, as bluntly as possible, is that Pieter Peeperkorn—with his regal mask, his high, creased brow, his poignantly ragged lips—was both at the same time. Both viewpoints seemed to fit him, to cancel one another out when you looked at him: both this and that, the one as well as the other. Yes, this stupid old man, this masterful zero! He did not paralyze the nerve of antithesis with confusion and obstructionism the way Naphta did; he was not ambiguous like him, or if so, then in an entirely contrary, positive fashion—he was the staggering mystery that went not only beyond mere stupidity and cleverness, but also beyond so many of the other opposites that Settembrini and Naphta conjured up to create high tension for pedagogic purposes. Personality, so it seemed, was not pedagogic—and yet, what an opportunity it presented for a tourist thirsty for knowledge. What a strange feeling to watch this ambiguity coming from a king when the disputants began to speak of marriage and sin, the sacrament of indulgence, the guilt and innocence of lust. He tilted his head toward his shoulder and chest, the pained lips separated and spread, the mouth gaped in slack lamentation, the nostrils flared wide as if in anguish, the creases on the brow rose and spread, lending the eyes a look of pale suffering—a picture of bitterness. And behold, in a flash the martyrdom blossomed into sensuality. The tilt of the head suddenly implied roguishness; the lips, still open, smiled lewdly; the sybaritic dimple, familiar from earlier occasions, appeared in one cheek—and there was the dancing heathen priest, who jerked his head in jest and pointed in a cerebral direction. And they heard him say: “Ah, yes, yes, yes—agreed. That is—those are—it just goes to show—the sacrament of lust, you understand—”

And yet, as we have said, Hans Castorp’s diminished friends and mentors were still at their best when arguing. They were in their element then, whereas “stature” was not, and one could at least be of differing minds as to what role it actually did play. But they were undoubtedly at a disadvantage when wit and Word and Spirit were no longer at issue, and the topic turned to facts, to earthy, practical affairs, to those questions and things where masterful natures truly prove themselves. Then it was all over for the antagonists, they stepped back into the shadows, became insignificant, and Peeperkorn grabbed the scepter—directed, decided, ordered, commanded, controlled. Was it any wonder, then, that he strove to achieve this state of affairs and to leave logomachy behind? He suffered as long as it reigned, or if it reigned too long; not out of vanity, however—Hans Castorp felt sure of that. Vanity has no stature, and greatness is never vain. No, Peeperkorn’s desire for reality was rooted in something else: in “fear,” to put it quite bluntly—in his obsession with honor, in the zeal for duty that Hans Castorp had tried to explain to Herr Settembrini and wanted to declare as a kind of military trait.

“Gentlemen—,” the Dutchman said, raising his lance-nailed captain’s hand in a gesture that both implored and commanded. “Fine, gentlemen, agreed, excellent! Asceticism—indulgence—sensual lust—let me say that—by all means! Eminently important! Eminently controversial! And yet, permit me to say—I fear that we are about to commit a—ladies and gentlemen, we are avoiding, we are irresponsibly avoiding the holiest of—” He took a deep breath. “This air, ladies and gentlemen, this day’s foehn air so rich in character, so tenderly enervating, suggestive and reminiscent of spring’s fragrance—we should not breathe it in merely so that in the form of—I implore you: we should not do it. That is an insult. For its own sweet, simple sake, we must totally and fully—oh, and with our highest and most perceptive—settled, ladies and gentlemen! And only as an act in purest praise of its properties should we then release it from our—but I must break off, ladies and gentlemen. I must break off in honor of this—” He had stopped now to lean back and look up, shading his eyes with his hat; they all followed his example. “I call your attention,” he said, “to the heights above, far above us, to that black speck circling up there against the singular blue, shading into black—It is a bird of prey, a large bird of prey. It is, if I am not totally—gentlemen, and you my child, it is an eagle. I most emphatically call your attention—you see! That is no buzzard, no vulture—were you all as farsighted as I, what with my advancing—yes, my child, to be sure, advancing. My hair is white, to be sure. You could then tell as clearly as I from the blunt curvature of his pinions—an eagle, ladies and gentlemen. A golden eagle. He circles directly above us in the blue, without beating his wings he hovers there in those magnificent heights above our—and, to be sure, peers out from his keen, farsighted eyes beneath the jutting bone of the brow. The eagle, gentlemen, Jupiter’s bird, the king of his race, the lion of the air! He has feathered legs and a beak of iron, an iron hook at the very tip, and talons of horrendous power, claws that turn inward, one long rear claw that forms an iron vise with those at the front. Look, like this!” And he tried to mimic an eagle’s claw with his own lance-nailed captain’s hand. “Good fellow, why do you peer and circle there!” he cried, turning to look back up. “Plummet! Strike that head, those eyes, with your iron beak, rip open the belly of the creature whom God has—Agreed! Settled! Your talons shall be tangled in its entrails and your beak shall drip with blood—”

He was bursting with enthusiasm, and that was the end of the promenaders’ interest in Naphta and Settembrini’s antinomies. And the sighting of the eagle had other unspoken effects on decisions and activities that now followed under Mynheer’s direction: they made a stop; there was food and drink, quite outside the normal schedule, but with appetites now stimulated by silent thoughts of the eagle, a bout of eating and drinking, like so many that Mynheer initiated outside the Berghof, wherever he happened to be—in Platz or Dorf, at an inn in Glaris or Klosters, to which they would take the little train on excursions. They enjoyed the classic gifts under his majestic direction: coffee with cream and country breads, or rich cheeses and fragrant Alpine butter, which also tasted marvelous with hot, roasted chestnuts, all washed down by as much Veltliner red as the heart desired; and Peeperkorn would accompany these impromptu meals with grand tattered phrases, or he might demand a tale from Anton Karlovitch Ferge, the good-natured martyr to whom all higher things were utterly foreign, but who knew some very down-to-earth details about the manufacture of Russian galoshes—sulfur and other ingredients were added to raw rubber, and the finished boots were then lacquered and “vulcanized” at temperatures over two hundred and fifty degrees. He also told them about the Arctic Circle, to which business had taken him on several occasions, about the midnight sun and the perpetual winter at North Cape. And the descriptions emerged from his gnarled throat and from under his overhanging moustache: the steamer had looked very tiny against those massive cliffs and the steel-gray surface of the sea. And streaks of yellow light had spread across the sky—the northern lights. And it all had seemed very spooky to him—not just the whole scene, Anton Karlovitch had even seemed spooky to himself.