HANS CASTORP was in his loggia, studying a plant which, now that the astronomical summer had begun, and the days were shortening, flourished luxuriantly in many places: the columbine or aquilegia, of the ranunculus family, which grew in clumps, with long stalks bearing the blue, violet, or reddish-brown blossoms, and spreading herbaceous foliage. They grew everywhere, but most profusely in that quiet bottom where, nearly a year ago, he had first seen them: that remote and wooded ravine, filled with the sound of rushing water, where on the bench above the footbridge, that ill-risked, ill-timed, ill-fated walk of his had ended. He revisited it now and again.
It was, if one began it a little less rashly than he had, no great distance thither. If you mounted the slope from the end of the sledge-run in the village, you could reach in some twenty minutes the picturesque spot where the wooden bridge of the path through the forest crossed above the run as it came down from the Schatzalp, provided you kept to the shortest route, did not loiter about, nor pause too long to get your breath. Hans Castorp, when Joachim was detained at home in the service of the cure, for some examination, blood-test, x-ray photography, weighing, or injection, would stroll thither in good weather, after second breakfast, or even after first; or he would employ the hours between tea and dinner in a visit to his favourite spot, to sit on the bench where once the violent nose-bleeding had overtaken him, to listen with bent head to the sound of the torrent and gaze at the secluded scene, with the hosts of blue aquilegias blooming in its depths.
Was it only for this he came? No, he sat there to be alone: to recall and go over in his mind the events and impressions of the past months. They were many, varied, and hard to classify; so interwoven and mingled they seemed, as almost to obscure any clear distinction between the concrete fact and the dreamed or imagined. But one and all, they had in their essence something fantastic, something which made his heart, unreliable as it had been from his first day up here, stand still when he thought of them, and then wildly flutter. Or could its flutterings be sufficiently accounted for by the reflection that a round year had gone by since first he sat here, that on this very spot whither once he had come in a condition of lowered vitality and seen the apparition of Pribislav Hippe, the aquilegias were blossoming anew?
Now, at least, on his bench by the rushing water, he had no more nose-bleeding—
that was a thing of the past. Joachim had said from the very first that it was not easy to get acclimatized, and at the time of that earlier visit he was still finding it difficult. But he had made progress; and now, after eleven months, the process must be regarded as finished. More, in that direction, could not be expected. The chemistry of his digestion had adjusted itself, Maria had her ancient relish, his parched mucous membranes having sufficiently recovered to let him savour again the bouquet of that estimable brand of cigars. He still loyally ordered them from Bremen whenever his stock ran low, although the shop-windows of the international resort displayed attractive wares. Maria, he felt, made a sort of bond between him, the exile, and his home in the “flat-land”—a bond more effectual than the postcards he now and then sent to his uncle, the intervals between which grew longer in proportion as he imbibed the more spacious time conceptions prevalent “up here.” He mostly sent picture postcards, as being pleasanter to receive, with charming views of the valley in winter and in summer dress. They gave precisely the room he needed to tell his kinsmen the latest news of his state, whatever had been let fall by the doctors after the monthly or general examination: such as that, both to sight and hearing, he had unmistakably improved, but was still not entirely free from infection; that his continued slight excess of temperature came from small infected areas which were certain to disappear without a trace if he had patience, and then he would never need to return hither. He well knew that long letters were neither asked nor expected, it being no humanistic or literary circle to which he addressed himself down there, and the replies he received were equally lacking in expansiveness. They merely accompanied the means of subsistence which came to him from home, the income from his paternal inheritance. Turned into Swiss currency, this was so advantageous that he had never spent one instalment when the next arrived, enclosed in a letter of a few typed lines signed
“James Tienappel,” conveying his greetings and best wishes for recovery, together with the same from Grand-uncle Tienappel and sometimes from the seafaring Peter as well.
The Hofrat, so Hans Castorp told his people, had latterly given up the injections: they did not suit the young patient. They gave him headache and fatigue, caused loss of appetite, reduced his weight, and, while making his temperature go up at first, had not succeeded in reducing it in the long run. His face glowed rosy-red with dry, internal heat, a sign that for this child of the lowland, bred in an atmosphere that rejoiced in a high degree of humidity, acclimatization could only consist in “getting used to not getting used to it”—which, in fact, Rhadamanthus himself never did, being perpetually purple-cheeked. “Some people can’t get used to it,” Joachim had said; and this seemed to be Hans Castorp’s case. For even that trembling of the neck, which had come upon him soon after his arrival here, had never quite passed off, but would attack him as he walked or talked—yes, even up here in his blue-blossoming retreat, while he sat pondering the whole complex of his adventures; so that the dignified chin-support of Hans Lorenz Castorp had become almost fixed habit with him. He himself would all at once be conscious of using it and have a swift memory of the old man’s choker collar, the provisional form of the ruff; the pale gold round of the christening basin; the ineffably solemn sound of the “great-great-great.” These and suchlike associations would gradually in their turn lead him back to reflect upon the whole mass of his adventures in life.
Pribislav Hippe never again appeared to him in bodily form, as once eleven months before. The progress of acclimatization was over, there were no more visions. No more did his body lie supine while his ego roved back to a far-off present. No more of such incidents. The vividness and clarity of that memory-picture, if it returned to hover before his eyes, yet kept within sane and normal bounds—but might move Hans Castorp to draw out of his breast pocket the glass plate which he had received as a gift, and kept there in an envelope enclosed in a letter-case. It was a small negative. Held in the same plane with the ground, it was black and opaque; but lifted against the light, it revealed matter for a humanistic eye: the transparent reproduction of the human form, the bony framework of the ribs, the outline of the heart, the arch of the diaphragm, the bellows that were the lungs; together with the shoulder and upper-armbones, all shrouded in a dim and vaporous envelope of flesh—that flesh which once, in Carnival week, Hans Castorp had so madly tasted. What wonder his unstable heart stood still or wildly throbbed when he gazed at it, and then, to the sound of the rushing waters, leaning with crossed arms against the smooth back of his bench, his head inclined upon one shoulder, among the blossoming aquilegias, began to turn over everything in his mind!
It hovered before his eyes—the image of the human form divine, the masterpiece of organic life—as once upon that frosty, starry night when he had plunged so
profoundly into the study of it. His contemplation of its inner aspect was bound up in the young man’s mind with a host of problems and discriminations, not of a kind the good Joachim had need to concern himself with, but for which Hans Castorp had come to feel as a civilian responsible. True, down in the plain he had never been aware of them, nor probably ever would have been. It was up here that the thing came about, where one sat piously withdrawn, looking down from a height of five thousand feet or so upon the earth and all that therein was—and it might be, also, by virtue of one’s physical condition, with one’s body brought, as it were, into higher relief by the toxins that were released by the localized inner infection to burn, a dry heat, in the face. His musings brought him upon Settembrini, organ-grinder and pedagogue, whose father had seen the light of day in Hellas, who chose to define love of the image as comprehending politics, eloquence, and rebellion, and who would consecrate the burgher’s pike upon the altar of humanity. He thought of Comrade Krokowski, and the traffic they two had been having in the twilighted room below stairs. He thought of the twofold nature of analysis, and questioned how far it was applicable to realities and conducive to progress, how far related to the grave and its noisome anatomy. He called up the figures of the two grandfathers, the rebel and the loyalist, both, for reasons diametrically opposed, black-clad; confronted them with each other, and tried their worth. He went further, and took counsel with himself over such vast problems as form and freedom, body and spirit, honour and shame, time and
eternity—and succumbed to a brief but violent spell of giddiness, on a sudden thought that all about him the columbines were in blossom once more, and his year here rounding to its close.
He had an odd name for the serious mental preoccupations which absorbed him in his picturesque retreat; he called them “taking stock”; the expression, crude as it was, defined for him an employment which he loved, even though it was bound up in his mind with the phenomena of fear and giddiness and palpitation, and made his face burn even more than its wont. Yet there seemed a peculiar fitness in the fact that the mental strain involved obliged him to make use of the ancestral chin-support; that way of holding his head lent him an outward dignity in keeping with thoughts which passed through his brain as he contemplated the image.
“Homo dei” — that was what the ugly Naphta had called the image, when he was defending it against the English doctrine of an economic society. And, by a natural association, Hans Castorp decided that in the interest of these mental activities of his, and his responsible position as a civilian member of society, he must really—and Joachim must too—pay that little man the honour of a visit. Settembrini did not like the idea, as Hans Castorp was shrewd and thin-skinned enough to know. Even the first meeting had displeased the humanist, who had obviously tried to prevent it and protect his pupils from intercourse with Naphta, notwithstanding that he personally associated and discussed with him. His “pupils”—thus life’s delicate child disingenuously put it, knowing all the time that it was himself alone who was the object of Settembrini’s solicitude. So it is with schoolmasters. They permit themselves relaxations, saying that they are “grown up,” and refuse the same to their pupils, saying that they are not “grown up.” It was a good thing, then, that the hand-organ man was not actually in a position to deny young Hans Castorp anything—nor had even tried to do so. It was only necessary that the delicate child should conceal his thin-skinned perceptions and assume an air of unconsciousness; when there was nothing to prevent his taking friendly advantage of Naphta’s invitation. Which, accordingly, he did, Joachim going along with him, willy-nilly, on a Sunday afternoon after the main rest-cure, not many days later than their first meeting.
It was but a few minutes’ walk from the Berghof down to the vine-wreathed cottage door. They went in, passing on their right the entrance to the little shop, and climbed the narrow brown stairs to the door of the first storey. Near the bell was a small plate, with the name of Lukaçek, Ladies’ Tailor. The door was opened by a half-grown boy, in a sort of livery of gaiters and striped jacket, a little page, with shaven poll and rosy cheeks. Him they asked for Professor Naphta, impressing their names on his mind, as they had brought no cards; he said he would go and deliver them to Herr Naphta—
whom he named without a title. The door opposite the entrance stood open, and gave a view of the shop, where, regardless of the holiday, Lukaçek the tailor sat crosslegged on a table and stitched. He was sallow and bald-headed, with a large, drooping nose, beneath which his black moustaches hung down on both sides his mouth and gave him a surly look.
“Good-afternoon,” Hans Castorp greeted him.
“Grütsi,” answered the tailor, in the Swiss dialect, which fitted neither his name nor his looks and sounded queer and unsuitable.
“Working hard?” went on Hans Castorp, motioning with his head. “Isn’t to-day Sunday?”
“Something pressing,” the tailor said curtly, stitching.
“Is it pretty? Are you making it in a hurry for a party?” Hans Castorp guessed. The tailor let this question hang, for a little; bit off his cotton and threaded his needle afresh. After a while he nodded.
“Will it be pretty?” persisted Hans Castorp. “Will it have sleeves?”
“Yes, sleeves; it’s for an old ‘un,” answered Lukaçek, with a strong Bohemian accent. The return of the lad interrupted this parley, which had been carried on through the doorway. Herr Naphta begged the gentlemen to come in, he announced, and opened a door a few steps further on in the passage, lifting the portière that hung over it to let them enter. Herr Naphta, in slippers, stood on a mossy green carpet just within, and received his guests.
Both cousins were surprised by the luxury of the two-windowed study. They were even astonished; for the poverty of the cottage, the mean stair and wretched corridor, led one to expect nothing of the kind. The contrast lent to Naphta’s elegant furnishings a note of the fabulous, which of themselves they scarcely possessed, and would not otherwise have had in the eyes of Hans Castorp and Joachim Ziemssen. Yet they were elegant too, even strikingly so; indeed, despite writing-table and bookshelves the room hardly had a masculine look. There was too much silk about—
wine-coloured, purplish silk; silken window-hangings, silken portières, and silken coverings to the furniture arranged on the narrow side of the room in front of a wall almost entirely covered with a Gobelin tapestry. Baroque easy-chairs with little pads on the arms were, grouped about a small metal-bound table, and behind it stood a baroque sofa with velvet cushions. Bookcases lined the entrance wall on both sides of the door. They and the writing-table or, rather, roll-top desk, which stood between the windows, were of carved mahogany; the glass doors of the bookcases were lined with green silk. But in the corner to the left of the sofa-group stood a work of art, a large painted wood-carving, mounted on a red-covered dais: a pietà, profoundly startling, artlessly effective to the point of being grotesque. The Madonna, in a cap, with gathered brows and wry, wailing mouth, with the Man of Sorrows on her lap—
considered as a work of art it was primitive and faulty, with crudely emphasized and ignorant anatomy, the hanging head bristling with thorns, face and limbs bloodbesprinkled, great blobs of blood welling from the wound in the side and from the nail-prints in hands and feet. This show-piece did indeed give a singular tone to the silken chamber. The wall-paper, on the window wall and above the bookcases, had obviously been supplied by the tenant: the green stripe in it matched the soft velvet carpet spread over the red drugget. The windows had cream-coloured blinds down to the floor. Only the ceiling had been impossible to treat: it was bare and full of cracks; but a small Venetian lustre hung down from it.
“We’ve come for a little visit,” said Hans Castorp, with his eyes more on the pious horror in the corner than on the owner of the surprising room, who was expressing his gratification that the cousins had kept their word. With a hospitable motion of his small right hand he would have ushered them to the satin chairs. But Hans Castorp went as if spellbound straight up to the wooden group, and stood before it, arms akimbo and head on one side.
“What is this you have here?” he asked, in a low voice. “It’s frightfully good. What depiction of suffering! It’s old, of course?”
“Fourteenth century,” answered Naphta. “Probably comes from the Rhine. Does it impress you?”
“Enormously,” said Hans Castorp. “It would impress anybody—couldn’t help it. I should never have thought there could be anything in the world at once so—forgive me—so ugly, and so beautiful.”
“All works of art whose function it is to express the soul and the emotions,” Naphta responded, “are always so ugly as to be beautiful, and so beautiful as to be ugly. That is a law. Their beauty is not fleshly beauty, which is merely insipid—but the beauty of the spirit. Moreover, physical beauty is an abstraction,” he added; “only the inner beauty, the beauty of religious expression, has any actuality.”
“We are most grateful to you for making these distinctions clear,” Hans Castorp said. “Fourteenth century?” he inquired of himself; “that means thirteen hundred soand-so? Yes, that is the Middle Ages, the way the books say; and I can more or less recognize in this thing the conception I have been getting of them lately. I never knew anything about the Middle Ages before, myself, being on the technical side. But up here they have been brought home to me in various ways. There was no economic doctrine of society then, that’s plain enough. What is the name of the artist?”
Naphta shrugged his shoulders.
“What does it matter?” he said. “We should not ask—for in the time when it was made they never did. It was not created by some wonderful and well-advertised single genius. It is an anonymous product, anonymous and communal. Moreover, it is very advanced Middle Ages—Gothic, signum mortificationis. No more of the palliating and beautifying that the Roman epoch thought proper to a depiction of the
Crucifixion: here you have no royal crown, no majestic triumph over martyrdom and the world. It is the most utter and radical declaration of submission to suffering and the weakness of the flesh. Pessimistic and ascetic—it is Gothic art alone which is truly that. You are probably not familiar with the work of Innocent III, De miseria humanæ
conditionis: an exceedingly witty piece of writing—it was written at the end of the twelfth century, but this was the earliest art to furnish an illustration to it.”
Hans Castorp heaved a deep sigh. “Herr Naphta,“ he said, “every word you say interests me enormously. ‘ Signum mortificationis’— is that right? I’ll remember it.
‘Anonymous and communal’—and that will take some thinking about too. You are quite right in assuming I don’t know the work of that pope—I take it Innocent III was a pope? Did I understand you to say it is witty and ascetic? I must confess I should never have thought the two things went hand in hand; but when I put my mind to it, of course it is obvious that a discourse on human misery gives one a good chance to poke fun at the things of the flesh. Is the work obtainable? Perhaps if I got up my Latin I could read it.”
“I have it here,” Naphta said, motioning with his head toward one of the bookcases.
“It is at your service. But, shall we not sit down? You can look at the pietà from the sofa. Tea is just coming in.”
The little servant was fetching the tea, also a charming silver-bound basket containing slices of layer cake. And behind him, on the threshold, who should stand, on winged feet, wreathed in his subtle smile, and exclaiming: “Sapperlot!” and
“Accidente”—who, indeed, but the lodger from upstairs, Herr Settembrini, dropped in to keep them company? From his little window, he said, he had seen the cousins enter, and made haste to finish the page of the encyclopædia which he had at the moment in hand, in order to beg an invitation. Nothing more natural than his coming: it was justified by his old acquaintance with the Berghof guests, no less than by his relations with Naphta, which, despite deep-seated divergences of opinion, were lively on both sides, the host accepting his presence as a thing of course. All this did not prevent Hans Castorp from getting two impressions from his advent, one as clearly as the other: first, that Herr Settembrini had come to prevent them—or rather him—from being alone with little Naphta, and to establish, as it were, a pedagogic equilibrium; second, that Herr Settembrini did not object the least in the world, but rather the contrary, to exchanging his room in the loft for a sojourn in Naphta’s fine and silken chamber, nor to taking a good and proper tea. He rubbed together his small yellow hands, with their line of hair running down the back from the little finger, before he fell to, with unmistakable and outspoken relish upon the layer cake, which had a chocolate filling.
The conversation continued on the subject of the pietà, Hans Castorp holding it to the point with look and word, and turning to the humanist as though to put him in critical rapport with the work of art. Herr Settembrini’s aversion was obvious in the very air with which he turned towards it—for he had originally sat down with his back to that corner of the room. He was too polite to express all he felt, and confined himself to pointing out certain defects in the physical proportions of the work, offences against nature, which were far from working upon his emotions, because they did not spring from archaic ineptitude, but from deliberate bad intent—a fundamentally opposed principle.—In which latter statement Naphta maliciously concurred. Certainly, there was no question of technical lack of skill. What we had here was conscious emancipation from the natural, a contempt for nature manifested by a pious refusal to pay her any homage whatever. Whereupon Settembrini declared that disregard of nature and neglect of her study only led men into error. He characterized as absurd the formlessness to which the Middle Ages and all periods like them had been a prey, and began, in sounding words, to exalt the Græco-Roman heritage, classicism, form, and beauty, reason, the pagan joy of life. To these things and these alone, he said, was it given to ameliorate man’s lot on earth. Hans Castorp broke in here. What, he asked, about Plotinus, then, who was known to have said that he was ashamed of having a body? Or Voltaire, who, in the name of reason, protested against the scandalous Lisbon earthquake? Were they absurd? Perhaps. Yet it seemed to him, as he thought about it, that what one characterized as absurd might also be thought of as intellectually honourable; from which it would follow that the absurd hostility to nature evinced by Gothic art, when all was said and done, was as fine in its way as the gestures of Plotinus or Voltaire, since it testified to the selfsame emancipation, the same indomitable pride, which refused to abdicate in favour of blind natural forces—
Naphta burst out laughing. He sounded more than ever like a cracked plate and ended in a fit of coughing.
Settembrini said floridly to Hans Castorp: “Your brilliance is almost a discourtesy to our host, since it makes you appear ungrateful for this delicious cake. But I don’t know that gratitude is your strong point. The kind I mean consists in making a good use of favours received.”
As Hans Castorp looked rather mortified, he added in his most charming manner:
“We all know you for a wag, Engineer: but your sly quips at the expense of the true, the good, and the beautiful will never make me doubt your fundamental love of them. You are aware, of course, that there is only one sort of revolt against nature which may be called honourable; that which revolts in the name of human beauty and human dignity. All others bring debasement and degradation in their train, even when not directed to that end. And you know, too, what inhuman atrocities, what murderous intolerance were displayed by the century to which the production behind me owes its birth. Look at that monstrous type, the inquisitor—for instance, the sanguinary figure of Conrad von Marburg—and his infamous zeal in the persecution of everything that stood in the way of supernatural domination! You are in no danger of acclaiming the sword and the stake as instruments of human benevolence!”
“Yet in its service,” countered Naphta, “laboured the whole machinery by means of which the Holy Office freed the world of undesirable citizens. All the pains of the Church, even the stake, even excommunication, were inflicted to save the soul from everlasting damnation—which cannot be said of the mania for destruction displayed by the Jacobins. Permit me to remark that any system of pains and penalties which is not based upon belief in a hereafter is simply a bestial stupidity. And as for the degradation of humanity, the history of its course is precisely synchronous with the growth of the bourgeois spirit. Renaissance, age of enlightenment, the natural sciences and economics of the nineteenth century, have left nothing undone or untaught which could forward this degradation. Modern astronomy, for example, has converted the earth, the centre of the All, the lofty theatre of the struggle between God and the Devil for the possession of a creature burningly coveted by each, into an indifferent little planet, and thus—at least for the present—put an end to the majestic cosmic position of man—upon which, moreover, all astrology bases itself.”
“For the present?” Herr Settembrini asked, threateningly. His own manner of speaking had something in it of the inquisitor waiting to pounce upon the witness so soon as he shall have involved himself in an admission of guilt.
“Certainly. For a few hundred years, that is,” assented Naphta, coldly. “A vindication, in this respect, of scholasticism is on the way, is even well under way, unless all signs fail. Copernicus will go down before Ptolemy. The heliocentric thesis is meeting by degrees with an intellectual opposition which will end by achieving its purpose. Science will see itself philosophically enforced to put back the earth in the position of supremacy in which she was installed by the dogma of the Church.”
“What? What? Intellectual opposition? Science philosophically enforced? What sort of voluntarism is this you are giving vent to? And what about pure knowledge, what about science? What about the unfettered quest for truth? Truth, my dear sir, so indissolubly bound up with freedom, the martyrs in whose cause you would like us to regard as criminals upon this planet but who are rather the brightest jewels in her crown?”
Herr Settembrini’s question, and its delivery, were prodigious. He sat very erect, his righteous words rolled down upon little Naphta, and he let his voice swell out at the end, so that one could tell how sure he was his opponent could only reply with shamefaced silence. He had been holding a piece of layer cake between his fingers, but now he laid it back on his plate, as if loath to bite into it after launching his question. Naphta responded, with disagreeable composure: “My good sir, there is no such thing as pure knowledge. The validity of the Church’s teaching on the subject of science, which can be summed up in the phrase of Saint Augustine: Credo, ut intellegam: I believe, in order that I may understand, is absolutely incontrovertible. Faith is the vehicle of knowledge, intellect secondary. Your pure science is a myth. A belief, a given conception of the universe, an idea—in short, a will, is always in existence; which it is the task of the intellect to expound and demonstrate. It comes down every time to the quod erat demonstrandum. Even the conception of evidence itself, psychologically speaking, contains a strong element of voluntarism. The great schoolmen of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were agreed that what is false in theology cannot be true in philosophy. We can, if you like, leave theology out of the argument; but a humanity, a cultural conception, which refuses to recognize that what is philosophically false cannot be scientifically true, is not worthy the name. The accusation of the Holy Office against Galileo stated that his thesis was philosophically absurd. A more crushing arraignment could not well be.”
“Aha! The reasoning of our great genius turned out in the long run to have the greater validity! No, let us be serious, Professore! Answer me this, answer me in the presence of these two young listeners: Do you believe in truth, in objective, scientific truth, to strive after the attainment of which is the highest law of all morality, and whose triumphs over authority form the most glorious page in the history of the human spirit?”
Hans Castorp and Joachim—the first faster than the second—turned their heads from Settembrini to Naphta.
Naphta replied: “There can be no such triumphs as those you speak of; for the authority is man himself—his interests, his worth, his salvation—and thus between it and truth no conflict is possible. They coincide.”
“Then truth, according to you—”
“Whatever profits man, that is the truth. In him all nature is comprehended, in all nature only he is created, and all nature only for him. He is the measure of all things, and his welfare is the sole and single criterion of truth. Any theoretic science which is without practical application to man’s salvation is as such without significance, we are commanded to reject it. Throughout the Christian centuries it was accepted fact that the natural sciences afforded man no edification. Lactantius, who was chosen by Constantine the Great as tutor to his son, put the position very clearly when he asked in so many words what heavenly bliss he could attain by knowing the sources of the Nile, or the twaddle of the physicists anent the heavenly bodies. Answer him if you can! Why have we given the Platonic philosophy the preference over every other, if not because it has to do with knowledge of God, and not knowledge of nature? Let me assure you that mankind is about to find its way back to this point of view. Mankind will soon perceive that it is not the task of true science to run after godless understanding; but to reject utterly all that is harmful, yes, even all that ideally speaking is without significance, in favour of instinct, measure, choice. It is childish to accuse the Church of having defended darkness rather than light. She did well, and thrice well, to chastise as unlawful all unconditioned striving after the ‘pure’
knowledge of things—such striving, that is, as is without reference to the spiritual, without bearing on man’s salvation; for it is this unconditioned, this a-philosophical natural science that always has led and ever will lead men into darkness.”
“Your pragmatism,” Settembrini responded, “needs only to be translated into terms of politics for it to display its pernicious character in full force. The good, the true, and the just, is that which advantages the State: its safety, its honour, its power form the sole criterion of morality. Well and good. But mark that herewith you fling open the door for every sort of crime to enter; while as for human truth, individual justice, democracy, you can see what will become of them—”
“If I might be permitted,” Naphta interpolated, “to introduce a little logic into the premisses, I should state the question thus: either Ptolemy and the schoolmen were right, and the world is finite in time and space, the deity is transcendent, the antithesis between God and man is sustained, and man’s being is dual; from which it follows that the problem of his soul consists in the conflict between the spiritual and the material, to which all social problems are entirely secondary—and this is the only sort of individualism I can recognize as consistent—or else, on the other hand, your Renaissance astronomers hit upon the truth, and the cosmos is infinite. Then there exists no suprasensible world, no dualism; the Beyond is absorbed into the Here, the antithesis between God and nature falls; man ceases to be the theatre of a struggle between two hostile principles, and becomes harmonious and unitary, the conflict subsists merely between his individual and his collective interest; and the will of the State becomes, in good pagan wise, the law of morality. Either one thing or the other.”
“I protest!” cried Settembrini, holding his tea-cup outstretched at arm’s length toward his host. “I protest against the imputation that the modern State means the subjugation of the individual to evil ends! I protest against the dilemma in which you seek to place us, between Prussianism and Gothic reaction! Democracy has no meaning whatever if not that of an individualistic corrective to State absolutism of every kind. Truth and justice are the immediate jewels of personal morality. If, at times, they may appear to stand counter, even to be hostile, to the interests of the State, they may do so while all the time holding before their eyes her higher, yes, let us boldly say, her spiritual weal. To find in the Renaissance the origin of Stateworship—what bastard logic! The achievements wrung from the past—I use the word literally, my dear sir—wrung from the past by the Renaissance and the intellectual revival are personality, freedom, and the rights of man.”
The listeners heaved each a deep sigh—they had been holding their breaths during Herr Settembrini’s great replication. Hans Castorp did not let himself go altogether, yet could not refrain from slapping the edge of the table with his hand. “Magnificent,”
he said, between clenched teeth. Joachim too evinced lively approval, despite the word Herr Settembrini had let fall about Prussianism. Both of them turned toward the antagonist who had just suffered this crushing rebuff— Hans Castorp with such eagerness that he fell unconsciously into the very posture he had taken at the pigdrawing, his elbows on the table and his chin in his palm, and peered in suspense into Herr Naphta’s face.
And Naphta sat there, tense and motionless, his lean hands in his lap. He said: “I try to introduce a little logic into the debate, and you answer me with lofty sentiments. I was already tolerably well aware that what is called liberalism—individualism the humanistic conception of citizenship—was the product of the Renaissance. But the fact leaves me entirely cold, realizing as I do that your great heroic age is a thing of the past its ideals defunct, or at least lying at their latest gasp, while the feet of those who will deal them the coup de grâce are already before the door. You call yourself, if I am not mistaken, a revolutionist. But you err in holding that future revolutions will issue in freedom. In the past five hundred years, the principle of freedom has outlived its usefulness. An educational system which still conceives itself as a child of the age of enlightenment, with criticism as its chosen medium of instruction, the liberation and cult of the ego the solvent of forms of life which are absolutely fixed—such a system may still, for a time, reap an empty rhetorical advantage; but its reactionary character is, to the initiated, clear beyond any doubt All educational organizations worthy of the name have always recognized what must be the ultimate and significant principle of pedagogy: namely the absolute mandate, the iron bond, discipline, sacrifice, the renunciation of the ego, the curbing of the personality. And lastly, it is an unloving miscomprehension of youth to believe that it finds its pleasure in freedom: its deepest pleasure lies in obedience.”
Joachim sat up straight. Hans Castorp reddened. Herr Settembrini excitedly twisted his fine moustache.
“No,” Naphta went on. “Liberation and development of the individual are not the key to our age, they are not what our age demands. What it needs, what it wrestles after, what it will create—is Terror.”
He uttered the last word lower than the rest; without a motion of his body. Only his eye-glasses suddenly flashed. All three of them, as they heard it, jumped, even Herr Settembrini, who, however, promptly collected himself and smiled.
“And may one ask,” he queried, “whom, or what—you see I am all question, I ask even how to ask—whom, or what you envisage as the bringer of this—this—I repeat the word with some unwillingness—this Terror?”
Naphta sat motionless, flashing like a drawn blade. He said: “I am at your service. I believe I do not err in assuming our agreement in the conception of an original ideal state of man, a condition without government and without force, an unmediated condition as the child of God, in which there was neither lordship nor service, neither law nor penalty, nor sin nor relation after the flesh; no distinction of classes, no work, no property: nothing but equality, brotherhood, and moral perfectitude.”
“Very good. I agree,” declared Settembrini. “I agree with everything except the relations after the flesh, which obviously must at all times have subsisted, since man is a highly developed vertebrate, and, like other creatures of his kind—”
“As you like. I am merely stating our fundamental agreement with respect to the original, paradisial state of man, his freedom from law, and his unmediated relation with God, which state was lost to him by his fall. I believe we may go side by side for another few steps of the way: in that we both explain the State as a social contract, taking account of the Fall and entered into as a safeguard against evil, and that we both see in it the origin of sovereign power—”
“Benissimo!” cried Settembrini. “Social contract—why, that is Enlightenment, that is Rousseau. I had no idea—”
“One moment, pray. We part company here. All power and all control was originally vested in the people, who made it over, together with the right to make laws, to their princes. But from this your school deduces in the first instance the right of the people to revolt from the monarchy. Whereas we, on the contrary—”
“We?” thought Hans Castorp, breathlessly. “Who are ‘we’? I must certainly ask Settembrini afterwards, whom he means by ‘we.’ ”
“We, for our part,” Naphta was saying, “perhaps no less revolutionary than you, have consistently deduced the supremacy of the Church over the secular power. The temporal nature of the power of the State is, as it were, written on its forehead; but even if it were not, it would be enough to point to the historical fact that its authority goes back to the will of the people, whereas that of the Church rests upon the divine sanction, to establish its character as a device which, if not precisely contrived by the power of evil, is nevertheless a faulty and inadequate makeshift.”
“The State, my dear sir—”
“I am acquainted with your views on the subject of the national State. As your Virgil has it: ‘Fatherland-love conquers all, and hunger unsated for glory.’ You add the corrective of a somewhat liberal individualism—that is democracy, but it leaves quite untouched your fundamental relation to the State. That the soul of democracy is the power of money, apparently does not impugn it—or would you deny the fact?
Antiquity was capitalistic, because of its State cult. The Christian Middle Ages clearly recognized the inherent capitalism of the secular State: ‘Money will be emperor’ is a prophecy made in the eleventh century. Would you deny that it has now literally come to pass, and with it the utter bedevilment of life in general?”
“My dear friend, you have the floor. I am only eager to make the acquaintance of the Great Unknown, the bringer of the Terror.”
“A perilous curiosity on your part, as the spokesman of a class of society which has acted as the standard-bearer of freedom—considering it is that very freedom that has dragged the world to the brink of destruction. Your goal is the democratic Imperium, the apotheosis of the principle of the national State in that of the universal, the WorldState. And the emperor of this World-State? Your Utopia is monstrous—and yet, at this point, we find ourselves to a certain extent again on common ground. For your capitalistic world-republic is, in truth, transcendental in character; the World-State is the secular State transcended; and we unite in the faith that the final, perfected State, lying dim upon the far horizon, should correspond to man’s original, primitive perfection. Since the time of Gregory the Great, the founder of the State of God, the Church has always regarded it as her task to bring mankind back under the divine guidance. Gregory’s claim to temporal power was put forward not for its own sake, but rather because his delegated dictatorship was to be the means and the way to the goal of redemption—a transitional stage between the pagan State and the heavenly kingdom. You have spoken to your pupils here of the bloody deeds of the Church, her chastisements and her intolerance; very foolishly so, for it stands to reason that the zeal of the godly cannot be pacifistic in character—Gregory himself said: ‘Cursed be the man who holds back his sword from the shedding of blood.’ That power is evil we know. But if the kingdom is to come, then it is necessary that the dualism between good and evil, between power and the spirit, here and hereafter, must be for the time abrogated to make way for a single principle, which shall unify asceticism and domination. This is what I mean by the necessity for the Terror.”
“But the standard-bearer, the standard-bearer?”
“Do you still ask? Is your Manchester liberalism unaware of the existence of a school of economic thought which means the triumph of man over economics, and whose principles and aims precisely coincide with those of the kingdom of God? The Fathers of the Church called mine and thine pernicious words, and private property usurpation and robbery. They repudiated the idea of personal possessions, because, according to divine and natural law, the earth is common to all men, and brings forth her fruits for the common good. They taught that avarice, a consequence of the Fall, represents the rights of property and is the source of private ownership. They were humane enough, anti-commercial enough, to feel that all commercial activity was a danger to the soul of man and its salvation. They hated money and finance, and called the empire of capital fuel for the fires of hell. The fundamental economic principle that price is regulated by the operation of the law of supply and demand, they have always despised from the bottom of their hearts; and condemned taking advantage of chance as a cynical exploitation of a neighbour’s need. Even more nefarious, in their eyes, was the exploitation of time; the montrousness of receiving a premium for the passage of time—interest, in other words—and misusing to one’s own advantage and another’s disadvantage a universal and God-given dispensation.”
“Benissimo!” cried Hans Castorp, in his excitement availing himself of Herr Settembrini’s formula of assent. “The time—a universal, God-given dispensation!
That is highly important.”
“Quite,” said Naphta. “Indeed, these humane spirits were revolted by the idea of the automatic increase of money; they regarded as usury every kind of interest-taking and speculation, and declared that every rich man was either a thief or the heir of a thief. They went further. Like Thomas Aquinas, they considered trade, pure and simple, buying and selling for profit, without altering or improving the product, a contemptible occupation. They were not inclined to place a very high value on labour in and for itself, as being an ethical, not a religious concern, and performed not in the service of God, but as a part of the business of living. This being the case, they demanded that the measure of profit or of public esteem should be in proportion to the actual labour expended, and accordingly it was not the tradesman or the industrialist, but the labourer and the tiller of the soil, who were honourable in their eyes. For they were in favour of making production dependent upon necessity, and held mass production in abhorrence. Now, then: after centuries of disfavour these principles and standards are being resurrected by the modern movement of communism. The
similarity is complete, even to the claim for world-domination made by international labour as against international industry and finance; the world-proletariat, which is today asserting the ideals of the Civitas Dei in opposition to the discredited and decadent standards of the capitalistic bourgeoisie. The dictatorship of the proletariat, the politico-economic means of salvation demanded by our age, does not mean domination for its own sake and in perpetuity; but rather in the sense of a temporary abrogation, in the Sign of the Cross, of the contradiction between spirit and force; in the sense of overcoming the world by mastering it; in a transcendental, a transitional sense, in the sense of the Kingdom. The proletariat has taken up the task of Gregory the Great, his religious zeal burns within it, and as little as he may it withhold its hand from the shedding of blood. Its task is to strike terror into the world for the healing of the world, that man may finally achieve salvation and deliverance, and win back at length to freedom from law and from distinction of classes, to his original status as child of God.”
Thus Naphta. The little group was silent. The young men looked to Herr Settembrini. It was, they felt, his affair.
He said: “Astounding. I am staggered—I admit it. I had not expected this. Roma locuta. Rome has spoken, and how—how has she spoken! Herr Naphta has before our eyes performed a hieratic salto mortale— if the epithet is inconsistent, the inconsistency has been ‘temporarily abrogated’—oh, yes! I repeat, it is astounding. Could you conceive, Professor, of any possible criticism, if only on the score of consistency?
A few minutes ago you were at pains to make comprehensible to us a Christian individualism based on the dualism of God and the world, and to prove its pre-eminence over all politically determined morality. And now you profess a socialism pushed to the point of dictatorship and terrorism. How do you reconcile the two things?”
“Opposites,” said Naphta, “may be consistent with each other. It is the middling, the neither-one-thing-nor-the-other that is preposterous. Your individualism, as I have already taken the liberty of remarking, is defective. It is a confession of weakness. It corrects its pagan State morality by the admixture of a little Christianity, a little ‘rights of man,’ a little so-called liberty—but that is all. An individualism that springs from the cosmic, the astrological importance of the individual soul, an individualism not social but religious, that conceives of humanity not as a conflict between the ego and society, but as a conflict between the ego and God, between the flesh and the spirit—a genuine individualism like that sorts very well with the most binding communism.”
“Anonymous and communal,” said Hans Castorp.
Settembrini glared at him. “Be quiet, Engineer,” he said, with a severity probably due to nervous irritation. “Inform yourself, but don’t try to express your views. That is an answer, at least,” he said, turning to Naphta again. “It gives me cold comfort, but it is an answer. Let us examine all the consequences flowing from it. Along with industry, your Christian communism would reject machinery, technique, material progress. Along with what you call trade—money and finance, which in antiquity ranked higher than agriculture and manual labour—you reject freedom. For it is clear, so clear as to be evident to the meanest intelligence, that all social relations, public and private, would be attached to the soil, as in the Middle Ages; even—I feel some reluctance to say it—even the person of the individual. If only the soil can maintain life, then only the possession of it can confer freedom. Manual labourers and peasants, however honourable their position, if they possess no real property, can only be the property of those who do. As a matter of fact, until well on in the Middle Ages the great mass of the population, even the town-dwellers, were serfs. In the course of our discussion you have let fall various allusions to the dignity of the human being. Yet you are defending the morality of an economic system which deprives the individual of liberty and self-respect.”
“About self-respect and the lack of it,” responded Naphta, “there is a good deal to be said. For the moment, I should be glad if the association were to make you conceive of liberty less as a beautiful gesture and more as a serious problem. You assert that Christian morality, with all its beauty and benignity, makes for servitude. And I, on the other hand, assert that the question of freedom—the question of cities, to put it more concretely—has always been a highly ethical question, and is historically bound up with the inhuman degeneration of commercial morality, with all the horrors of modern industrialism and speculation, and with the devilish domination of money and finance.”
“I must insist that you do not take refuge behind scruples and antinomies, but come out squarely where you belong, in favour of the blackest sort of reaction.”
“It would be the first step toward true liberty and love of humanity to free one’s mind of the flabby fear engendered by the very mention of the word reaction.”
“Well, that is enough,” declared Herr Settembrini, in a voice that trembled slightly, pushing away his cup and plate—they were empty by now—and rising from the satin sofa. “Enough for to-day, enough for a whole day, I should think. Our thanks, Professor, for the delicious entertainment, and for the very spirituel discourse. My young friends here from the Berghof are summoned by the service of the cure, and I should like, before they go, to show them my cell up above. Come, gentlemen. Addio, Padre!”
Hans Castorp marked the appellation with lifted brows. So now it was padre! They submitted to Herr Settembrini’s breaking up the little party and disposing of themselves without giving Naphta the chance to come along supposing he had been inclined. The young men in their turn thanked their host and took their leave, urged by Naphta to come again. They went with Herr Settembrini, Hans Castorp bearing with him the crumbling pasteboard volume containing De miseria humanæ conditionis, which his host put into his hands. The surly Lukaçek still sat on his table and sewed at the sleeved garment for the old woman. They had to pass his open door to mount the ladderlike stair to the top storey. It was, properly speaking, scarcely a storey at all, being simply a loft with naked rafters and beams inside the roof; it had the close air of a garret and smelt of warm shingles. But it was divided into two rooms, which served the republican capitalist and belletristic collaborator on the Sociology of Suffering as study and sleeping-cabinet. These he blithely displayed to his young friends, characterizing them as retired and cosy, in order to supply them with suitable adjectives in which to praise them, which they accordingly did. They both found his quarters charmingly cosy and retired, just as he said. They had a glimpse into the tiny sleeping-chamber, merely a short and narrow bedstead in the corner under the sloping roof, and a small drugget on the floor beside it; then they turned again to the study, which was no less sparsely furnished, but orderly to the point of formality, or even frigid. Heavy old-fashioned chairs, four in number, with rush seats, were symmetrically placed on either side the door, the divan was pushed against the wall, and a round table with a green cover held the centre of the room, upon which for all ornament—or, possibly, for refreshment, but in any case with an effect of chaste sobriety—there stood a water-bottle with a glass turned upside-down over it. Books and pamphlets leaned against each other in a little hanging shelf, and at the open window stood a high-legged, flimsy folding desk, with a small, thick felt mat on the floor beneath it, just large enough to afford standing-room. Hans Castorp took up position here for a minute to try what it was like. This was Herr Settembrini’s workshop, where he wrote articles in belles-lettres to contribute to the encyclopædia of human suffering. The young man rested his elbows on the slanting surface of the desk, and announced that he found the little apartment very retired and cosy. Thus, he presumed, aloud, might Ludovico’s father, with his long, aristocratic nose, have bent over his work at Padua—and learned that he was standing, indeed, at the very desk of the deceased scholar; nay, more, that the chairs, the table, even the water-bottle, had been his, and that the chairs had come down from the Carbonaro grandfather, the walls of whose law office at Milan they once had graced. That made a great
impression on the young people; the chairs straightway began in their eyes to betray affinity with political agitation—Joachim, who had been sitting all unconscious on one, with his legs crossed, got up at once, looked at it mistrustfully, and did not sit down again. But Hans Castorp, at the elder Settembrini’s desk, thought how the younger now laboured here, to mingle the politics of the grandfather and the father’s humanism in a blend of literary beauty. At length they all went off together, the author having offered to see his friends to their door.
They were silent for some way; but the silence spoke of Naphta, and Hans Castorp could wait. He felt sure Herr Settembrini would mention his house-mate, had come out with them for that very purpose. He was not mistaken.
Drawing a long breath, as if to get a good start, the Italian began: “My friends, I should like to warn you.”
As he paused, after that, Hans Castorp asked, affecting surprise: “Against what?”
He might as well have said against whom, but expressed himself impersonally to show how completely unconscious he was of Herr Settembrini’s meaning—a meaning which even Joachim perfectly comprehended.
“Against the personage whose guest we have just been,” answered Settembrini,
“and whose acquaintance I have unwillingly been the means of your making. Chance willed it, as you saw, I could not prevent it. But the responsibility is mine, and as such I feel it. It is my duty to point out to your tender years the intellectual perils of intercourse with this man, and to beg you to keep your acquaintance with him within safe limits. His form is logic, but his essence is confusion.”
“He does seem rather weird,” was Hans Castorp’s view. “Some of the things he said were very queer: it sounded as if he meant to say that the sun revolves round the earth.” But how could they, he went on, have suspected that a friend of his, Herr Settembrini’s, was an unsuitable person for them to associate with? As he himself admitted, they had made the acquaintance through him, had met the man first in his company, and seen that the two walked and took tea together. Surely that must mean—
“Of course, Engineer, of course.” Herr Settembrini’s voice was full of mild resignation, it even trembled. “I am open to this rejoinder, and so you make it. Good. I am quite ready to accept the responsibility. I live under the same roof as this man, our meetings are unavoidable, one word leads on to another, an acquaintance is formed. Herr Naphta is a person of most unusual mental powers. He is by nature discursive, and so am I. Condemn me if you will—I avail myself of the opportunity to cross swords with an antagonist who is after all my equal. I have no one else—anywhere.—
In short, it is true that I visit him and he me, we take walks together. We dispute. We quarrel, nearly every day, till we draw blood; but I confess the contrariness and mischievousness of his ideas but render our acquaintance the more attractive. I need the friction. Opinions cannot survive if one has no chance to fight for them—and I am only confirmed in mine. How could you assert so much of yours, Lieutenant, or you, Engineer? You are defenceless against intellectual sophistry, you are exposed to danger from the influence of this half fanatical, half pernicious quackery—danger to the intellect and to the soul.”
Hans Castorp rejoined that it was probably all true; he and his cousin were naturally more or less prone to such dangers—it was the same old story about the delicate child of life, he understood perfectly. But on the other hand, one might cite Petrarch and his maxim, which was familiar to Herr Settembrini. And after all it was worth listening to, all that Naphta had to say. One must admit that that about the communistic period, when no one would be allowed to receive interest, was first-rate; also some of the things he said about education which he, Hans Castorp, would probably never otherwise have got to hear.
Settembrini compressed his lips, and Hans Castorp hastened to say that, as for his own attitude, it was of course entirely non-partisan; he only meant that he had enjoyed hearing what Naphta had to say about the deepest desire of youth. “But do explain this one thing to me,” he went on. “This person—I call him that by way of showing my detachment, and that I don’t by any means altogether agree with all he says, but am inclined to make important reservations—”
“And very rightly so,” cried Settembrini gratefully. “—He had a great deal to say against money, the soul of the State, as he expressed himself, and against propertyholding, which he considers thievery; in short, against the capitalistic system, which he called, if I remember rightly, fuel for the fires of hell, or something like that. He sang the praises of the Middle Ages for forbidding the taking of interest. And all the time the man himself must have, if I may say so—you get such a surprise when you first enter his room and see all that silk—”
“Ah, yes,” smiled Settembrini, “the taste is very characteristic of him.”
“—the beautiful old furniture,” Hans Castorp went on, “the pieta out of the fourteenth century, the Venetian lustre, the little page in livery—and such a lot of chocolate layer cake, too—he must personally be pretty well off, I should think—”
“Herr Naphta,” Settembrini answered, “is, personally, as little of a capitalist as I am.”
“But?” queried Hans Castorp. “There is a but in your tone, Herr Settembrini.”
“Well, those people never let anyone lack who belongs to them.”
“Those people?”
“The Fathers.”
“Fathers? What Fathers?”
“Why, Engineer, I mean the Jesuits.”
A pause ensued. The cousins displayed the greatest astonishment. Hans Castorp cried out: “What! Good Lord!—you can’t mean it! You don’t mean to say the man is a Jesuit!”
“You have guessed aright,” Herr Settembrini said with punctilio.
“I never in all my life—who would ever think of such a thing? So that is why you called him padre!”
“That was a polite exaggeration,” Settembrini answered. “Herr Naphta is not a Father. His illness is to blame for his not having got that far. But he has finished his noviciate and taken his first vows. The state of his health obliged him to give up his theological studies, after which he spent some years in a school belonging to the Society, where he acted as prefect and preceptor of the younger pupils. That was in sympathy with his pedagogic leanings, and he continues in the same line up here, by teaching Latin at the Fridericianum. He has been here five years. When, or if, he can leave this place, remains in doubt. But he belongs to the Society, and even if the bond were a looser one than it is, he would never want for anything. As I told you, he is personally poor; that is to say, without possessions. That is the rule of the Society; which, however, commands immense riches, and, as you saw, looks well after its own.”
“Thunder and lightning!” Hans Castorp said. “And I never even knew that such things existed any more! A Jesuit! Well, well! But do tell me—if he is so well looked after by those people, why in the world does he live—I don’t mean to say a word about your lodgings, Herr Settembrini, and you are certainly charmingly fixed, at Lukaçek’s, it is so retired and cosy there; but I mean, if Naphta really has such a pile as that, to speak vulgarly, why doesn’t he take another apartment, in a better house, more stately, with a proper entrance and large rooms? There is something secret and suspicious-looking about him, there in that hole, with all that silk—”
Settembrini shrugged his shoulders.
“He is probably guided by considerations of taste and tact,” he said “I imagine he salves his anti-capitalistic conscience by living in a poor house, and indemnifies himself by living in the style he keeps. And I should say that discretion plays some role in the affair too. No use advertising to all the world how well the Devil takes care of his own. He shows an unpretentious façade, and behind it gives free rein to tastes—
such as a prince of the Church—”
“Extraordinary!” Hans Castorp said. “It is all perfectly new and astonishing to me—I am free to confess. Why, Herr Settembrini we are really very much indebted to you for this new acquaintance. Many a time and oft we shall be going down to pay him a visit—I am sure of that. Such discourse does wonders in the way of enlarging the horizon—it gives one glimpses into a world the existence of which one never dreamed. A proper Jesuit! When I say proper the adjective stands for all that passes through my mind ss I say it. I mean, is he a real, actual Jesuit? I know you mean a person can’t be proper with the Devil supporting him from behind—but what I mean is, is he proper as a Jesuit? That is what I am thinking. He said certain things—you know the ones I mean—about modern communism, and the religious zeal of the
proletariat, and not withholding its hand from bloodshed—I wont discuss them further, but surely your grandfather, with his citizen’s pike, was a perfect ewe lamb by comparison—please forgive my language. Is that allowed? Do his authorities stand for it? Is that the doctrine of the Roman Church, which all the religious societies all over the world propagate by means of intrigue, or so they say? Isn’t it—what is the word? —heretical, abnormal, incorrect? Those are the things I am thinking about Herr Naphta—and I should be pleased to have your opinion on them.”
Settembrini smiled. “Very simple. Herr Naphta is, of course, first of all a Jesuit. He is that always, and before everything else. But he is also a man of intellect—or I should not be seeking his society—and as such he is always searching for new combinations, new associations and adaptations, new shades of meaning proper to the time. You saw how he surprised even me by his theories. He had never gone so far with me before. I made use of the very evident stimulus of your presence to stir him up to the point of saying his last word on a certain subject. It sounded ridiculous enough, monstrous enough—”
“Yes, yes; but tell me, why did he never become a Father? He was old enough, wasn’t he?”
“I did tell you—it was his illness prevented him.”
“Well, but don’t you think—if he is first a Jesuit and second a man of intellect, always making new combinations—don’t you think this second, added characteristic has to do with his illness?”
“What do you mean by that?”
“I only mean—look: he has a moist spot, and that hinders him from becoming a Father. But his combinations would probably have hindered him anyhow, and so, in a certain way, the spot and the combinations hang together. In his way he too is a sort of delicate child—a joli jésuite with a petite tache humide.”
They had reached the sanatorium, but stood in a little group on the terrace before the house talking still awhile before parting, and watched by a few guests who happened to be lounging there. Herr Setrembrini said: “I repeat, my young friends—I warn you. I cannot prevent you from cultivating the acquaintance now it is made, if curiosity leads you to do so. But arm yourselves, arm your hearts and minds with suspicion, oppose him with a critical spirit. I will characterize this man for you with a single word. He is a voluptuary.”
The cousins made astonished faces. Hans Castorp asked: “A—what? But he is a member of a Society. They have to take certain vows, I have always supposed—and then he is such a poor creature physically, so—”
“You are talking rubbish, Engineer,” Settembrini interposed. “It has nothing to do with physical insufficiency; while as for the vows you speak of, there are always reservations. I was speaking in a broader, more intellectual sense, your comprehension of which I felt I might presume upon, by now. You probably remember my visiting you one day in your room—it was long ago, frightfully long ago—you had just finished your three weeks in bed, after being received into the sanatorium.”
“Of course. You came in at dusk, and turned on the light—I remember it as if it were yesterday—”
“Good. We fell into talk, as we have often done, I rejoice to say, and upon somewhat elevated subjects. We spoke, I believe, of life and death: of the dignity of death in so far as it is the condition and appurtenance of life, and the grotesqueness into which it declines so soon as the mind erects it into an independent principle. Young men,” went on Herr Settembrini, standing close to the two, with the thumb and middle finger of his left hand splayed out like a fork, as if to collect their attention, while he raised the forefinger of his right in warning, “imprint it upon your minds: the mind is sovereign. Its will is free, it conditions the moral world. Let it once dualistically isolate death, and death will become, in actual fact, actu, by this mental act of will, you understand me, a power in itself, the power opposed to life, the inimical principle, the great temptation; whose kingdom is the kingdom of the flesh. You ask me why of the flesh? I answer you: because it unlooses and delivers, because it is deliverance—yet not deliverance from evil, but deliverance by evil. It relaxes manners and morals, it frees man from discipline and restraint, it abandons him to lust. If I warn you against this man, whose acquaintance with you I have unwillingly brought about, if I exhort you to go thrice-armed with a critical spirit in all your dealings with him, it is because all his thoughts are voluptuous, and stand under the ægis of death—and death is the most dissolute of powers, as I told you then, Engineer—I well remember my words, for I never fail to retain in my mind any good and telling phrase I may have chanced to avail myself of—a power hostile to civilization and progress, to work and to life, against whose mephitic breath it is the noblest task of the teacher to shield the mind of youth.”
Who could talk more beautifully than Herr Settembrini, who clearer, or in betterrounded periods? Hans Castorp and Joachim Ziemssen thanked him most warmly for all he had said, and mounted the Berghof steps, while Herr Settembrini betook himself once more to his humanistic writing-desk, in the storey above Naphta’s silken cell. This first visit of the cousins to Naphta, whose course we have described, was followed by two or three others; one, even, in the absence of Herr Settembrini. All of them afforded young Hans Castorp much food for thought, when, in his blueblossoming retreat, with the image of the human form divine, called Homo Dei, hovering before his mind’s eye, he sat and “took stock.”