The Magic Mountain (96 page)

“You may say so,” Settembrini acquiesced. “A trait at least worthy of praise. The courage to recognize and express—that is the quality that makes literature—that is humanism.”

Thus they parted on good terms, Herr Settembrini having given the conversation this placable turn. It was the wiser course; his position had not been so strong he could afford to push the argument to extremes. A conversation dealing with jealousy was rather slippery ground for him; at one point he would have been obliged to admit that his own position—as a pedagogue—was scarcely masculine in the social and cockfighting sense, else why should the prepotent Peeperkorn disturb his tranquillity, in the same way Naphta and Frau Chauchat did? Lastly, the Italian could not hope to argue his pupil out of interest in a personality to whose native superiority he himself and his partner in cerebral gymnastic were willy-nilly constrained to bow.

They were on safer ground when they could sustain the conversation in the realms of the intellectual, and hold the attention of their audience by one of their elegant and impassioned debates, academic, yet conducted as though the matter discussed were the most burning question of the time, or of all time. They were of course almost the sole support of such discussions; while these lasted; they did, to some extent, neutralize the effect of “bigness” purveyed by a certain member of their group, who could only accompany them by a running play of wrinkles, gestures, and snatches of mockery. But even that was enough to cast a shadow, rob their brilliant performance of some of its gloss, emasculate it, as it were, set up a cross-current perceptible to them all, though Peeperkorn himself remained unconscious, or conscious to a degree impossible for them to guess. Neither side could get any advantage, both were embarrassed, and the stamp of futility set upon their debate. We might put it like this: that their life-and-death duel of wits came to be carried on always with vague subterranean reference to “bigness” walking beside them, and to be deflected from its orbit by the magnetism “bigness” exerted. One cannot characterize otherwise this puzzling, for the two disputants maddening, posture of affairs. One can only add that had there been no Pieter Peeperkorn, party feeling would have run higher on both sides; as when Leo Naphta defended the arch-revolutionary nature of the Church, against Settembrini’s dogmatic assertion that that great historic power was to be looked upon merely as the protectress of the sinister forces of reaction; whereas all the forces that made for life and future, and looked undismayed on change and resolution, he claimed for the principles of enlightenment; science and progress, which had their rise in an epoch of quite opposed tendencies, the famous century that witnessed the rebirth of classical culture. He drove home his convictions with a graceful play of word and gesture. Whereupon Naphta, with chilling acuity, undertook to show—and showed too, with devastating clarity—that the Church, as the embodiment of the religious and ascetic ideal, was remote indeed from posing as the champion and support of the existing order, in other words of secular culture and civil law—rather had she from the beginning inscribed upon her radical banner the programme of their extirpation root and branch; that absolutely everything beloved and cherished of the bourgeoisie, the conservative, the cowardly, and the impotent—the State, family life, secular art and science—was consciously or unconsciously hostile to the religious idea, to the Church, whose innate tendency and permanent aim was the dissolution of all existing worldly orders, and the reconstitution of society after the model of the ideal, the communistic City of God.

After that, Settembrini took the floor—and well he knew how to avail himself of it. It was lamentable, he said—this confusion of luridly revolutionary doctrine with a general insurrection of all the powers of evil. The Church’s love of innovation had for centuries manifested itself in putting to the question the living idea, wherever she found it; throttling it, quenching it in smoke at the stake; to-day she announces through her emissaries that she rejoices in revolution, that her goal is the uprooting of freedom, culture, and democracy, which she intends to replace by barbarism and the dictatorship of the mob. Yea, verily, a fearsome mixture of contradictory consistency and consistent contradiction…

His opponent, Naphta retorted, displayed no lack of the same qualities. By his own account, he was a democrat; yet his words sounded neither democratic nor egalitarian; but rather displayed a reprehensible and arrogant aristocratism, as when he alluded to the delegated dictatorship of the proletariat as mob rule! However, where the Church was in question, assuredly he showed himself a democrat; for the Church was admittedly the most aristocratic force in the history of mankind; an aristocracy in the last and highest sense, that of the spirit. For the ascetic spirit—if the pleonasm might be pardoned him—the spirit that would deny and destroy the world, was aristocracy itself, a pure culture of the aristocratic principle. It could never be popular; and the Church, accordingly, had at all times been unpopular. A little research into the cultural history of the Middle Ages would convince Herr Settembrini of the stout resistance which the people—in the widest sense—opposed to the things of the Church. There were for instance monkish figures, the invention of popular fantasy, who, quite in the spirit of Luther, had set up wine, women, and song in opposition to the ascetic idea. All the instincts of secular heroism, all warlike spirit, all court poetry, set themselves in more or less open conflict with the religious idea and the hierarchy. For all that was “the world,” all that was “the common people,” compared with the aristocracy of the spirit represented by Church.

Herr Settembrini thanked him for jogging his memory. The figure of the monk Ilsan in the
Rosengarten
he did indeed find refreshing by comparison with this muchlauded aristocracy of the grave. He, the speaker, was no friend to the German Reformation; but they would find him ever ready to defend whatever of democratic individualism there was in its teaching, against any and every clerical and feudal craving for dominion over the individual.

“Aha!” cried Naphta. So Herr Settembrini would condemn the Church for lack of democracy, for being wanting in a sense of the value of human personality? But what of the humane freedom from prejudice evinced by canonical law? For whereas Roman law made the possession of legal rights dependent upon citizenship, and Germanic law upon individual freedom and membership in the tribe, ecclesiastical law, orthodoxy, was alone in divorcing legal rights from either national or social considerations, and asserting that slaves, serfs, and prisoners of war were all capable of making wills and inheriting property.

Settembrini bitingly remarked that he might mention, as not entirely irrelevant in this connexion, the so-called “canonical portion,” which subtracted a substantial sum from every testamentary bequest. And he spoke of priestly demagoguery, which began to vent its thirst for power in exaggerated solicitude for the under dog, when the top dog would none of it. The Church, he asserted, cared more about the quantity of souls she got hold of than their quality—which certainly reflected upon her pretensions to spiritual refinement.

So the Church lacked refinement? Herr Settembrini’s attention was invited to the inexorable aristocratism which underlay the idea that shame could be inherited: the passing on of guilt to the—democratically considered—innocent descendants; for example, the illegitimacy and lifelong pollution of natural children. But the Italian bade him be silent: in the first place, because his human feelings rose up in arms against Naphta’s words, and in the second, because he had had enough of such quibbles, and saw in the shifts of his opponent’s apologetics only the same old infamous and devilish cult of nihilism, which wanted to be called Spirit, and found so legitimate, so sacrosanct the admittedly existent hatred of the ascetic principle. But here Naphta begged to be forgiven for laughing outright. The nihilism or the Church! The nihilism of the most realistic system of government in the history of the world! Herr Settembrini, then, had never been touched by a breath of that ironic humanity which made constant concession to the world and the flesh, cleverly veiling the letter and letting the spirit rule, not to put too sore a constraint on nature? He had never heard of the ecclesiastical conception of indulgence, under which was to be classified one of the sacraments of the Church—namely, marriage, not in itself an absolute good, like the other sacraments, but only a protection against sin, countenanced in order to set bounds to sensual desire; that the ascetic principle, the ideal of complete chastity, might be upheld, without at the same time opposing an unpolitic harshness to the flesh?

Herr Settembrini, of course, could not refrain from protesting against this hideous conception of “policy”; against the gesture of a shrewd and sinister complaisance, made by the “Spirit”—or what called itself so—against the imaginary guilt of its opposite, which it pretended to deal with in a “politic” sense, but which in reality stood in no need of the pernicious indulgence it proffered; against the accursed dualism of a conception which bedevilled the universe—that is to say, life—as well as life’s dark opposite, the Spirit—for if life was evil, the Spirit, as pure negation, must be so too. And he broke a lance in defence of the blamelessness of sensual gratification—hearing which, Hans Castorp could not but think of the humanistic cuddy under the roof, with its standing desk, rush-bottomed chairs, and water-bottle. Naphta asserted that sensual gratification was never blameless—nature, he said, always had a bad conscience in respect of the spiritual. The ecclesiastical policy of indulgence practised by the Spirit he designated as “Love”—this to refute the nihilism of the ascetic principle. Hans Castorp felt how very odd indeed the word sounded in the mouth of sharp, skinny little Naphta.

So it went on—we know already how it went, and so did Hans Castorp. We have listened, as he did, for a little while, in order to learn how such a peripatetic passageat-arms fares, in what way it is blown upon, by the presence of a personality. It seemed as though a secret impulse to animadvert upon the presence of Peeperkorn quenched the leaping spark of wit, and called up that sense of weary devitalization that comes over us when an electric connexion fails to connect. Yes, that was it. No spark leaped nimbly from pole to pole, no flash of lightning, no current. The intellect which should in its own opinion have neutralized the presence was neutralized by it— as Hans Castorp, amazed and curious, perceived.

Revolution, conservation—he looked at Peeperkorn, saw him stalking along, not particularly majestic on foot, with his slumping gait, his hat drawn over his brows; saw his thick lips with their broken line, heard him say, jerking his head mockingly in the direction of the debaters: “Yes, yes—cerebrum, highly cerebral, you understand. Very; that is—it shows”—and behold, in a trice, the current cut off! Dead. As a doornail. They tried another tack, invoked more powerful spells, came on the “aristocratic problem,” on popularity and exclusiveness. Not a spark. Despite itself, what they said sounded personal. Hans Castorp saw Clavdia’s traveling-companion as he lay under the red satin coverlet, in his collarless woollen shirt, half ancient
ouvrier
, half royal bust. And the nerve of the debate quivered and died. They tried to galvanize it into life. Negation, cult of nihilism on the one hand, on the other the positive assertion of life, and the inclining of the heart unto love. But where was the spark, where the current, directly one looked at Mynheer, as one did, irresistibly, as though magnetized? They simply were not there—which remained, to use Hans Castorp’s expression, neither more nor less than a mystery. He took note, for his collection of aphorisms, that either one expresses a mystery in the simplest words, or leaves it unexpressed. But to get this one expressed, one could only say straight out that Pieter Peeperkorn, with his kingly mask, and bitter, irregular mouth, was both, now this, now that; both seemed to fit him and to neutralize each other when one looked at him—both this and that, the one and the other. Yes, this stupid old man, this commanding cipher! He did not paralyse the opposition by cross-purposes and confusion, like Naphta, he was not like him equivocal, or was so in an entirely different way, in a positive way, this staggering mystery, which so naïvely set at naught not only cleverness and stupidity, but so much else in the way of opposed views invoked by Settembrini and Naphta, in order to stimulate interest, to their own pedagogical ends. The personality, it appeared, was not pedagogically inclined—yet what a find, what a prize, for inquiring youth on its travels! Fascinating it was to watch riddling royalty when the conversation turned on marriage and sin, indulgences, the guilt or innocence of pleasures of the sense! His head would sink upon his shoulder or chest, the calamitous lips part as the mouth relaxed into pathetic curves, the nostrils dilate as with pain, the folds on the forehead rose until the eyes were fixed in a wide, suffering gaze.—It was a picture of bitterness and woe. And behold, as one looked, this martyr’s visage blossomed into wantonness. The head was roguishly on a side, the still open lips wreathed in wickedly suggestive smiles, the sybaritic little dimple appeared in one cheek—he was again the dancing priest, and jerked his head as before, mockingly, in the direction of so much cerebration, as they heard him say: “Ah, yes, yes, absolutely! But isn’t there a—are there not—sacraments of pleasure— you understand—”

Still, as we said, Hans Castorp’s diminished friends and teachers were always well served when they could wrangle. They were in their element, whereas the personality was not. Though one might have two views of the rôle he played when wrangling was the order of the day. But on the other hand, when the scene changed from the sphere of the intellectual to the strictly earthly and practical, and dealt with questions, and in fields, where commanding natures prove their worth—then there were no two views possible. For then the others were undone, then they were cast in the shade, then they drew in their horns, and Peeperkorn came out, grasped the sceptre, arranged, decided, “settled.” Was there any wonder, then, that he behaved so as to bring that state of things about, that he sought to override logomachy? He suffered, while it held sway, or if it held sway for long. But not in his vanity. Of that Hans Castorp felt assured. For vanity is not on the grand scale, nor is greatness vain. No, Peeperkorn’s need of reality had other grounds. It sprang, to put it baldly, from fear: from a characteristic infirmity of minds on the grand scale, from the sensitively and passionately cherished
point d’honneur
which Hans Castorp had struggled to explain to Herr Settembrini, describing it as in a sense a military trait.