The Magic Mountain (75 page)

Settembrini paid it homage. That indignity of corruption, he said, of which Naphta spoke, could by its means be redressed. On practical as well as on ideal grounds, mankind was now about to redress it. He explained that he was helping prepare for an international congress for the promotion of cremation, the scene of whose labours would probably be Sweden. A model crematorium would be exhibited, planned in accordance with the latest researches and experiments, with a hall of urns; they hoped to rouse widespread interest and enthusiasm. What an effete and obsolete procedure burial was, under our modern conditions—the price of land, the expansion of our cities and consequent shoving of the graveyards out on to the periphery! And the chop-fallen funeral processions, with their dignity curtailed by present-day traffic conditions! Herr Settembrini had plenty of disillusioning facts at his command. He made a droll picture of a grief-stricken widower on his daily pilgrimage to the graveside, to hold communion with the beloved departed; and said that the man must have a superfluity of that most precious of human commodities, time; and further, that the rush of business in a large modern burying-ground must surely dash his atavistic bliss. The destruction of the body by fire—what a cleanly, sanitary, dignified, yes, heroic conception that was, compared with abandoning it to the miserable processes of decay and assimilation by the lower forms of life! Yes, the newer method was more satisfying emotionally too, and kinder to the human longing after immortality. For what the fire destroyed was the more perishable part of the body, the elements which even during one’s life were got rid of by metabolism; whereas those which accompanied man through life, taking least share in the process of change, those became the ashes, and with them the survivors possessed the deceased’s imperishable part.

“Oh, charming,” Naphta said. “Oh, really,
very
good! Man’s imperishable part, his ashes!”

Naphta evidently meant to hold humanity fast to its old, irrational position in the face of established biological fact; meant to force it to remain at the stage of primitive religion, where death was a spectre surrounded by such mysterious terrors that the gaze of reason could not be focused upon it. What barbarism! The fear of death went back to a very low cultural stage, when violent death was the rule, and its horrors thus became associated with the idea of death in general. But now, thanks to the development of hygiene and the increase in personal security, a natural death was the rule, a violent one the exception; modern man had come to think of repose, after exhaustion of his powers, as not at all dreadful, but normal and even desirable. No, death was neither spectre nor mystery. It was a simple, acceptable, and physiologically necessary phenomenon; to dwell upon it longer than decency required was to rob life of its due. Accordingly, the Hall of Death (as the modern crematory and vault for the urns was to be called) would be supplemented by a Hall of Life, where architecture, painting, sculpture, music, and poetry would combine to draw the thoughts of the survivors from the contemplation of death, from weak and unavailing grief, and fix them upon the joys of life.

“On with the dance!” Naphta mocked. “Don’t let them make too much of the funeral rites, don’t let them pay too much respect to such a simple fact as death—but without that simple fact, there would never have been either architecture nor painting, sculpture nor music, poetry nor any other art.”

“Your remark is incomprehensible,” Settembrini answered him, “which doesn’t prevent it from being at the same time silly. Either the experience of death must be the last experience of life, or else it must be a bugaboo, pure and simple.”

“Will there be obscene symbols employed in the Hall of Life, like those on the ancient sarcophagi?” Hans Castorp asked with a serious air.

“By all accounts,” Naphta chimed in, “there will be a fine fat feeding for the senses.” In oils and in marbles, a humanistic taste would celebrate the glories of the senses—of the sinful body whose flesh it had saved from putrefaction. There was nothing surprising about that—it was of a piece with its fastidiousness in the matter of corporal punishment.

Thus they came upon the subject of torture—introduced by Wehsal, to whom, it seemed, it made a particular appeal. “The question,” now—what were the gentlemen’s views about it? He, Ferdinand, when he was “on the road,” liked to visit those quiet retreats in the centres of ancient culture, where such research into the conscience of man used to be carried on. He had seen the torture-chambers of Nuremberg and Regensburg, he had made a study of them, and been edified. They had certainly devised a number of ingenious ways of man-handling the body for the good of the soul. There had never been any outcry—they rammed the famous choke-pear, itself such a very tasty morsel, into the victim’s mouth, and after that silence reigned. “
Porcheria!”
Settembrini muttered.

The obdurate soul, offended justice, these warranted a temporary lack of mercy. But in fact, the torture was an invention of the human reason. Settembrini presumed that the speaker was not quite in his senses.

Oh, yes, he was pretty well in possession of them. It was Herr Settembrini, the professed æsthete, who was probably not altogether familiar with the history of the development of mediæval jurisprudence. There had been, in fact, a process of continuous rationalization, in the course of which reason had taken the place of God, who had been shoved out of the department of justice. In other words, trial by battle had fallen into disuse, because it had been observed that the stronger man conquered even when he was in the wrong. It had been people of Herr Settembrini’s kidney, the doubters and critics, who had made the observation, and brought about the Inquisition, which superseded the old naïve procedure. Justice no longer relied on the intervention of God in favour of the truth, but aimed to get it out of the accused by confession. No sentence without confession—you could hear that still among the people, for the instinct lodged deep with them; the chain of evidence might be as strong as it liked, but if there had been no confession, there would remain a lurking feeling that the sentence was illegitimate. But how get at the confession? How procure the truth, out of the mass of circumstance and suspicion? How look into the heart, the brain, of a man who denied and concealed? If the spirit was recalcitrant, there remained the body, which could be got at. The torture was recommended to reason, as a means to an end, the end of bringing out the indispensable confession. But it was Herr Settembrini who had demanded and introduced confession, and he, accordingly, who was responsible for torture.

The humanist implored the others not to believe a word of all this. Herr Naphta was indulging in a diabolical joke. If the position had really been what he said, if it were true that the horrible thing was actually an invention of the human reason, that only showed how grievously she always needed sustaining and enlightening, and how little ground the instinct-worshippers had for their fear that things could ever be too much directed by reason on this earth! But the speaker was of course in error. The judicial abomination they were discussing could not be laid at the door of the human reason, because it went back to an original belief in hell. The rack, the pincers, the screws and tongs you saw in these chambers of torment and martyrdom represented the effort of a childish and deluded fancy to emulate what it piously believed to be the sufferings of the eternally damned. But that was not all. They thought to assist the evil-doer, whose spirit they assumed to be wrestling after confession, while his flesh, the evil principle, set itself against the soul’s desire: they had it in mind to do him a service of love, in breaking his body by torture. It was a madness of asceticism—

Logical impasse. Hans Castorp tried to help out—as if it were his
metier
to guide such a conversation! Of his own accord, he flung into the arena the question of capital punishment. Torture, he said, was abolished—though examining magistrates still had ways of making an accused person pliable. But the death penalty persisted, it seemed impossible to do without it. It was practised by the most civilized nations. The French system of deportation had worked very badly. There was nothing feasible to do with certain half-human beings, except to make them a head shorter!

They were
not
“certain half-human beings” Settembrini corrected him. They were men, like the Engineer, like himself, Settembrini—only weak-willed victims of a defective social system. He cited the case of an abandoned criminal, the kind always referred to by the prosecuting attorneys as a “beast in human form,” who had covered the walls of his cell with verse, and not at all bad verse either, much better than most prosecuting attorneys ever managed to write.

That cast a somewhat singular light on the art of verse-writing, Naphta retorted, but was not otherwise worth answering.

Hans Castorp said he was not surpiseed to hear that Naphta favoured the death penalty. To his mind, Naphta was as revolutionary as Settembrini, only in a conservative direction—a reactionary revolutionist.

Herr Settembrini, with a confident smile, assured them that the world, after passing through a period of inhuman reaction, would always return to the normal order of things. But Herr Naphta preferred to discredit art sooner than admit that it might have a humanizing effect upon a sunken wretch. He need not expect, by such fanatical talk, to make much headway with light-seeking youth. He, Settembrini, had the honour to belong to a newly-formed league, the scope of which was the abolition of capital punishment in all civilized countries. It was not yet settled where the first congress should meet; but one thing was sure, that those who addressed it would have plenty of arguments at hand. He submitted some of them forthwith: the ever-present possibility that justice might err and judicial murder be committed; the hope of reformation, which it was never possible to disregard; the biblical injunction “Vengeance is mine.” Then he referred to the theory that the State, in its function not as the wielder of force, but as the instrument of human betterment, may not repay evil with evil; he attacked the conception of guilt, on the ground of scientific determinism; and lastly, he repudiated the whole theory of punishment.

On top of which “light-seeking youth” had to stand by while Naphta neatly wrung the neck of all these arguments, one after the other. He derided the humanist’s reluctance to shed blood, and his reverence for human life. He said that the latter was characteristic of our intensely bourgeois age, our policy of molly-coddle. Even so, its inconsistency was apparent. For let an idea arise that went beyond considerations of personal safety and well-being—and such ideas were the only ones worthy of human beings, and thus in a higher sense were the normal field of human activity—and the individual would, even under average emotional stress, be sacrificed without scruple to the higher claim. Nay, more: the individual, of his own free will, would expose himself without a thought. The philanthropy of his honoured opponent would eliminate from life all its stern and mortal traits; it would castrate life, as would the determinism of its so-called science. But determinism would never succeed in doing away with the conception of guilt. It could only add to its authority and its awfulness. Oh, so he demanded that the unhappy victim of social maladjustment be convinced of his own sinfulness, and tread in full conviction the path to the scaffold?

“Quite. The evil-doer is filled with his guilt as with himself. For he is as he is, and can and will not be otherwise—and therein lies his guilt.”

Naphta shifted the ground of the discussion from the empiric to the metaphysical. He went on to say that in behaviour, in action, determinism did indeed rule; there was no freedom of choice. But in being, the man is as he has wished to be, and as, until his last breath, he has never ceased to wish to be. He has revelled in slaying, and does not pay too dear in being slain. Let him die, then, for he has gratified his heart’s deepest desire. “Deepest desire?” “Deepest desire.”

They all gritted their teeth. Hans Castorp gave a little cough, Wehsal set his jaw awry. Herr Ferge breathed a sigh, Settembrini shrewdly remarked: “There is a kind of generalization that has a distinctly personal cast. Have you ever had a desire to commit murder?”

“That is no concern of yours. But if I had, I should laugh in the face of any ignorant humanitarianism that tried to feed me on skilly till I died a natural death. It is absurd for the murderer to outlive the murdered. They two, alone together, as two beings are together in only one other human relationship, have, like them, the one acting, the other suffering him, shared a secret that binds them for ever together. They belong to each other.”

Settembrini said frigidly that he lacked the brains necessary to the understanding of this death-and-murder mysticism—and he really didn’t miss them. No offence intended; Herr Naphta’s religious gift did undoubtedly far surpass his own, but he protested that he was not envious. His own nature had an unconquerable craving for fresh air; it kept him somewhat aloof from a sphere where reverence—and not merely the unthinking reverence of youth—was paid to suffering, and that in a spiritual as well as a physical sense. In that sphere, it was plain, virtue, reason, and healthiness counted for nothing, vice and disease were honoured in a wondrous way.

Naphta concurred. He said that being virtuous and healthy did not, in fact, constitute being in a state of religion at all. It would clear the air to have it plainly stated that religion had nothing to do with reason and morality.