The Magic Mountain (118 page)

What an agonizing situation. She does not understand. This woman—this Gypsy—cannot, will not, understand. Does not want to—for without a doubt, her rage, her scorn, is not just for the moment, not merely personal, it is hatred, an ancient hostility to the principle behind those French bugles—or Spanish horns—that call her beloved little soldier back; and her highest ambition, both instinctive and impersonal, is to triumph over that principle. She uses a very simple means to get her way. She claims if he leaves, he does not love her; and that is precisely what José, there inside the cabinet, cannot bear. He implores her to let him speak. She refuses. Then he forces her to listen—a devilishly serious moment. Ominous sounds rose from the orchestra, a gloomy, threatening theme, which as Hans Castorp knew, moved through the whole opera until the catastrophic end, but here also served as the introduction to the little soldier’s aria—the next record. And he put it on now.

“Through every long and lonely hour”—José sang it very beautifully; Hans Castorp often played this record by itself, removing it from its familiar context, and always listened in rapt sympathy. The content of the aria was not much, but the way it pleaded with such emotion touched him profoundly. The soldier sang about a flower that Carmen had tossed him when they first became acquainted and that had been his sole comfort in prison, where he had found himself on her account. In his inner turmoil, he admitted that there had been moments when he cursed fate for having placed Carmen in his path. But he had immediately repented of this blasphemy and on his knees begged God that he might see her again.
Then
—and this “then” was the same high note with which he had just sung his “to see you, dear Carmen, again”—
then
—and now the instrumental accompaniment unleashed all its available magic to paint the little soldier’s anguish and longing, his forlorn tenderness and sweet despair—
then
she had appeared in all her simple, fatal charm, and it had been perfectly clear to him that he was “lost” (“lost” with a great sobbing grace note preceding it), was lost for good and all. “Oh, my Carmen,” he sang. “My being is yours,” he sang in desperation, repeating the same anguished melodic phrase, which the orchestra also picked up again on its own, ascending two notes up from the dominant and with deepest fervor moving back to the fifth below. “My heart is yours,” he assured her in trite, but tenderest excess, using that same melodic phrase again; now he moved up the scale to the sixth to add, “And I am eternally yours,” then let his voice sink ten intervals and in great agitation confessed, “Carmen, I love you”—the last few notes agonizingly sustained above shifting harmonies, before the “you” with its grace note finally resolved the chord.

“Yes, yes,” Hans Castorp said in somber gratitude, and put on the finale, where everyone congratulated young José for standing up to his officer and thus cutting off his retreat, so that he would now have to desert the colors, just as Carmen had demanded, to his horror, only moments before.

Oh, follow to the mountains fair,
The hills and crags and purest air,

the chorus sang—and you could understand the words quite clearly.

To roam and walk with happy pride
Your fatherland, the world so wide!
You shall obey your will alone.
A gift more rare than precious stone
Is freedom, freedom, ’tis your own!

“Yes, yes,” he said once more, and moved onto a fourth piece, something very fine and dear to him.

That it was yet another French work is not our fault, any more than is the fact that once again the prevailing mood was military. It was an intermezzo, a vocal solo, a “prayer” from Gounod’s opera about Faust. Someone stepped forward, someone for whom he felt great sympathy, whose name was Valentin, but whom Hans Castorp called by another, more familiar name that carried great sadness with it and was identified in his mind with the person beginning to sing from the cabinet there, though the recorded voice was much more beautiful. It was a strong, warm baritone, and its song was in three parts, consisting of a frame of two closely related stanzas, quite religious in nature, almost in the style of a Protestant chorale, and a middle stanza that had a gallant, chivalresque spirit, warlike, lighthearted, but equally devout—which was what gave it such a French military feel. The invisible person sang:

And now since I must leave
My homeland far behind—

and, given these circumstances, turned to the Lord of heaven, begging him to protect the life of his dearest sister in the meantime. He was off to war, the rhythms bounced about, grew bold and daring—to hell with worry and care, he, the invisible singer, wanted to go where the battle was the fiercest, the danger the greatest, to meet the foe gallantly and devoutly, like a true Frenchman. But if God should call him to heaven, he sang, then he would be looking down from there to protect “you.” And by “you” he meant his dear sister; but all the same it touched Hans Castorp to the depths of his soul, and those emotions lasted to the very end, when the brave fellow inside there sang above the massive chords of a chorale:

O Lord of heaven, hear my prayer,
Take Marguerite into Thy tender care.

There was nothing else of importance about the record. We thought we should mention it briefly because Hans Castorp liked it so very much, and also because it will play a certain role later, on a rather strange occasion. But now, we have arrived at the fifth and final work in the group of real favorites—which, to be sure, was not another French piece, but something particularly, indeed exemplarily German, and not from an opera, either, but a song, one of those special lieder—simultaneously a masterpiece and a folk song, and that simultaneity was what stamped it with its particular intellectual and spiritual view of the world. But why all the fuss? It was Schubert’s “
Lindenbaum
,” none other than the old familiar “
Am Brunnen vor dem Tore.
”

Accompanied by a piano, it was sung by a tenor, a fellow with tact and taste, who knew how to treat its simultaneously simple and sublime material with a great deal of good sense, musical feeling, and narrative restraint. We all know that there is a great difference between how this splendid song sounds as an art song and as a tune in the mouths of children and everyday folks. In the latter case, it is sung to the basic melody, usually in simplified form, one stanza after the other; whereas here the original melody is already varied in a minor key by the second of the three eight-line stanzas, reemerges very beautifully in the major by the time the third stanza begins, is then dramatically abandoned in the “cold winds” that blow your hat from your head, and only finds its way back again in the last four lines of the stanza, where it is then repeated so that the song can be sung to an end. The most overpowering phrase of the melody occurs three times, always in its modulating second half—the third time, then, being in the reprise of the last half-stanza that begins “And many now the hours.” This magical phrase, which we do not want to abuse with words, is found in the lines: “So many words of love,” “As if they called to me,” and “Since I have been away.” And the warm, bright tenor voice, with its fine breath control and the hint of a restrained sob, sang it each time with such intelligent sensitivity for its beauty that it would grip the listener’s heart unexpectedly, particularly since the artist knew how to heighten the effect with an extraordinarily intense head voice on the lines “It
al
ways drew me back” and “And
here
you’ll find your rest.” In the repetition of the last verse, however, where the line reads, “You
could
have found rest here,” he sang “could have” the first time in full, yearning chest voice and only the second time in the gentlest of flute tones.

But enough of the song and this rendition of it. We would like to flatter ourselves that in our previous examples we succeeded in awakening in our listeners a general understanding of the intimate sympathy with which Hans Castorp approached his evening concerts. But it is, we must admit, a very tricky task to explain what this last work, this song, this old “linden tree,” meant to him, and the greatest care must be given to nuance, if we are not to do more harm than good.

Let us put it this way: an object created by the human spirit and intellect, which means a significant object, is “significant” in that it points beyond itself, is an expression and exponent of a more universal spirit and intellect, of a whole world of feelings and ideas that have found a more or less perfect image of themselves in that object—by which the degree of its significance is then measured. Moreover, love for such an object is itself equally “significant.” It says something about the person who feels it, it defines his relationship to the universe, to the world represented by the created object and, whether consciously or unconsciously, loved along with it.

Does anyone believe that our ordinary hero, after a certain number of years of hermetic and pedagogic enhancement, had penetrated deeply enough into the life of the intellect and the spirit for him to be
conscious
of the “significance” of this object and his love for it? We assert, we recount, that he had. The song meant a great deal to him, a whole world—a world that he evidently must have loved, or otherwise he would not have been so infatuated with the image that represented it. We know what we are saying when we add—perhaps somewhat darkly—that his fate might have been different if his disposition had not been so highly susceptible to the charms of the emotional sphere, to the universal state of mind that this song epitomized so intensely, so mysteriously. But that same fate had brought with it enhancements, adventures, and insights, had stirred up inside him the problems that came with “playing king,” all of which had matured him into an intuitive critic of this world, of this absolutely admirable image of it, of his love for it—had made him capable, that is, of observing all three with the scruples of conscience.

Anyone who would claim that such scruples are detrimental to love surely understands absolutely nothing about love. On the contrary, they are its very roots. They are what first add the prick of passion to love, so that one could define passion as scrupulous love. And what were Hans Castorp’s scruples, what questions did he ask himself when “playing king,” about the ultimate legitimacy of his love for this enchanting song and its world? What was this world that stood behind it, which his intuitive scruples told him was a world of forbidden love?

It was death.

But that is sheer madness! A beautiful, marvelous song like that? A pure masterpiece, born out of the profoundest, most sacred depths of a whole nation’s emotions—its most precious possession, the archetype of genuine feeling, the very soul of human kindness? What hateful slander!

Oh my, oh my—that was all very pretty, was what any honest man would have to say. And yet behind this sweet, lovely, fair work of art stood death. It had special ties with death, ties one might indeed love, but not without first “playing king,” not without intuitively taking into account a certain illegitimacy in such love. In its own original form, there may have been no sympathy with death, only something full of life and folk culture. But to feel spiritual and intellectual sympathy with it was to feel sympathy with death. In its beginnings, purest piety, the epitome of judicious concern—there should be no thought of contesting that. But in its train came the workings of darkness.

What was all this he had himself believing? He would not have let any of you talk him out of it. The workings of darkness. Dark workings. Torturers at work, misanthropy dressed in Spanish black with a starched ruff and with lust in place of love—the outcome of steadfast, pious devotion.

Settembrini, that old man of letters, was certainly not someone in whom he placed unqualified trust, but he recalled a certain lecture that his clear-minded mentor had once delivered, long ago, back at the start of his hermetic career—a lecture on “backsliding,” on “intellectual backsliding” in certain spheres. And he found it useful to apply those teachings, with some caution, to the object at hand. Herr Settembrini had characterized the phenomenon of backsliding as a “sickness”—and from his pedagogic viewpoint, even the worldview, the intellectual epoch, toward which one “slid back” might appear “sick” as well. But what’s this? Hans Castorp’s sweet, lovely, fair song of nostalgia, the emotional world to which it belonged, his love for that world—they were supposed to be “sick”? Not at all. There was nothing more healthy, more genial on earth. Except that this was a fruit—a fresh, plump, healthy fruit, that was liable, extraordinarily liable, to begin to rot and decay at that very moment, or perhaps the next; and although it was purest regalement of the spirit when enjoyed at the right moment, only a moment later and it could spread rot and decay among those who partook of it. It was a fruit of life, sired by death and pregnant with death. It was a miracle of the soul—the ultimate miracle, perhaps, in the eyes of unscrupulous beauty, who gave it her blessing; yet it was regarded with mistrust, and for valid reasons, by the responsible eye of someone “playing king,” who affirmed life and loved its organic wholeness. Both a miracle and, in response to the final compelling voice of conscience, the means by which he triumphed over himself.

Yes, triumph over self, that may well have been the essence of his triumph over this love—over this enchantment of the soul with dark consequences. In the solitude of night, Hans Castorp’s thoughts, or intuitive half-thoughts, soared high as he sat before his truncated musical coffin . . . ah, they soared higher than his understanding, were thoughts enhanced, forced upward by alchemy. Oh, it was mighty, this enchantment of the soul. We were all its sons, and we could all do mighty things on earth by serving it. One need not be a genius, all one needed was a great deal more talent than the author of this little song about a linden tree to become an enchanter of souls, who would then give the song such vast dimensions that it would subjugate the world. One might even found whole empires upon it, earthly, all-too-earthly empires, very coarse, very progressive, and not in the least nostalgic . . . his truncated musical coffin, inside which the song decayed into some electrical gramophone music. But the song’s best son may yet have been the young man who consumed his life in triumphing over himself and died, a new word on his lips, the word of love, which he did not yet know how to speak. It was truly worth dying for, this song of enchantment. But he who died for it was no longer really dying for this song and was a hero only because ultimately he died for something new—for the new word of love and for the future in his heart.