The Magic Mountain

by Thomas Mann

  And because Hans Castorp had begun to laugh, Herr Settembrini smiled, too, likewise pleased for the moment with the effect of his graphic words.

  “Fine, let us have a laugh,” he said. “You’ll always find me ready for mirth. ‘Laughter is the sparkle of the soul,’ as an ancient once said. And we have strayed to other matters that, I admit, are laden with difficulties, to problems we have encountered in our preparations for an international union of Masons, questions posed in particular by Protestant Europe. . . .” And warming to his topic, Herr Settembrini continued speaking of this international union, which had been born in Hungary and whose longed-for realization would surely confer upon Freemasonry the power to change the world. He casually showed Hans Castorp correspondence he had received from foreign Masonic dignitaries concerning this matter, a handwritten letter from the Swiss Grand Master, Brother Quartier la Tente of the Thirty-third Degree; and he discussed the plan to declare Esperanto the official world language of Freemasonry. His zeal lifted him to the world of high politics; his eye sweeping here and there, he appraised the chances revolutionary republican ideas might have in his own land, in Spain, in Portugal—and claimed to be in contact with persons who stood at the top of the Grand Lodge in that last-named monarchy. Affairs were most assuredly ripening toward decision. Hans Castorp should think of him when, in the very near future, events unfolded rapidly there. Hans Castorp promised he would.

  It should be noted that these Masonic colloquies—held separately between the apprentice and each of his mentors—had taken place during the period before Joachim’s return home to the people up here. The discussion to which we now turn, however, occurred during his second stay and in his presence, at the beginning of October, nine weeks after his return; and Hans Castorp always remembered this particular gathering under an autumn sun on the terrace of the Kurhaus in Platz, where they sipped refreshing drinks, because his secret worries about Joachim had begun that day, worries aroused by statements and symptoms that would normally not arouse concern, a sore throat and hoarseness in particular, harmless irritations, which nevertheless Hans Castorp saw in a peculiar light somehow, the light, one might say, that he believed he saw shining deep in Joachim’s eyes, those eyes that had always been so gentle and large, but which that day, for the very first time, had grown indescribably larger and deeper, and along with their usual calm, inner light had taken on a meditative and—one has no choice but to use the word—ominous expression, which it would be quite wrong to say Hans Castorp had not liked, he had in fact liked it, except that it had also given rise to his worries. In short, one cannot help speaking about it in confusion commensurate with his confused impressions.

  As for the conversation, the controversy—a controversy between Settembrini and Naphta, of course—it was about something entirely different, only loosely connected with their special discussions about Freemasonry. Besides the cousins, Ferge and Wehsal were also present, and everyone joined in eagerly, although not everyone was up to the subject. Herr Ferge, for example, expressly said he was not. But an argument carried on as if it were a matter of life and death, and with such wit and polish as if it were not, but merely an elegant competition—and that was how all disputes were carried on between Settembrini and Naphta—such an argument is, in and of itself, quite naturally entertaining to listen to, even for someone who understands little of it and only vaguely comprehends its significance. Raising their eyebrows, total strangers sitting nearby eavesdropped on the altercation, captivated by the passion and finesse of the interchange.

  This took place, as we said, in front of the Kurhaus, one afternoon after tea. The four guests from the Berghof had run into Settembrini there, and then quite by chance Naphta had joined them. They were sitting around a little metal table, drinking various alcoholic beverages diluted with soda—anisette, vermouth. Naphta, who had taken his tea here, had ordered wine and cake, apparently a reminiscence of his student days; Joachim frequently moistened his sore throat with real lemonade, which he drank very strong and sour, for its astringent, soothing effect; and Settembrini was enjoying simple sugared water, but drank it through a straw in a very charming, appetizing way, as if sipping the most costly of beverages.

  “What is this I hear, my good engineer? What rumor has come to my ears? Your Beatrice is returning? Your guide through all nine rotating spheres of paradise? Well, I can only hope that you will not totally disdain the friendly guiding hand of your Virgil as well. Our ecclesiastic here can confirm for you that the world of the medio evo is not complete if Franciscan mysticism lacks the opposing pole of Thomistic insight.”

  Everyone laughed at all this facetious erudition and looked now at Hans Castorp, who was also laughing and lifted his glass of vermouth to toast his “Virgil.” And it may be hard to believe, but the next hour was consumed by the inexhaustible intellectual fracas that grew out of Herr Settembrini’s harmless, though flamboyant remarks. For Naphta, in response to what had admittedly been something of a challenge, immediately went on the attack, impugning the Latin poet whom Settembrini, as they all knew, idolized, indeed ranked above Homer; whereas on more than one occasion Naphta had shown a caustic disregard of Virgil and of the Latin poets in general—and promptly and maliciously used this opportunity to do so again. It was solely because he shared the all too charitable biases of his age, he said, that the great Dante had taken that mediocre scribbler seriously and had assigned him such an important role in his own epic, a role to which Herr Lodovico probably assigned far too much Masonic significance. When, in fact, there was nothing to that fawning poet laureate and flunky of the Julians, that oh-so-urbane inkslinger and rhetorical show-off without a spark of creativity, whose soul, if he had one, was secondhand at best, who was not a poet at all, but a Frenchman togged out in a full Augustan wig of flowing curls.

  Herr Settembrini did not doubt that the honorable gentleman had means and methods by which to reconcile his office as a teacher of Latin with his disdain for the glories of Roman civilization. Though it did seem necessary to remind him that such opinions also put him at variance with the judgment of his favorite era, which not only had not disdained Virgil, but had also, in its naive fashion, rightly honored his greatness by making him a mighty seer and sorcerer.

  It was all in vain, Naphta responded, that Herr Settembrini appealed to the naiveté of those victorious morning years of Christianity—which had only proved its creative force by making demons of those it conquered. Moreover, the teachers of the early Church had never wearied of warning people against the lies of the philosophers and poets of antiquity, and in particular against sullying themselves with the lush eloquence of a Virgil. Indeed, the present day, when once again one age was heading for the grave even as a proletarian age was dawning, was a particularly appropriate time for respecting such sentiments. And as for the rest of his charge, Herr Lodovico could be sure that he, Naphta, pursued his modicum of bourgeois activity, to which the former had been kind enough to allude, with all due reservatio mentalis and that he recognized a certain irony in having found a niche in an educational institution devoted to classical rhetoric, a pedagogy whose life span even the most sanguine would estimate only in decades.

  “You Christians studied them,” Settembrini exclaimed, “studied the classical poets and philosophers until you broke out in a sweat, attempted to make their precious heritage your own, just as you used the stones of their ancient edifices for your meeting houses. Because you were well aware that no new art could come from your own proletarian souls and hoped to defeat antiquity with its own weapons. And so it will be again, so it will always be. And you with your crude visions of a new morning will likewise have to be taught by those whom—so at least you would like to persuade yourselves, and others—you despise. For without education you cannot prevail before humanity, and there is only one kind of education—you call it bourgeois, but in fact it is human.” A question of decades—until the end of humanistic education? Only good manners prevented Herr Settembrini from brea
king into mocking, carefree laughter. A Europe that knew how to preserve its eternal treasures would coolly, calmly proceed with the agenda of classical reason and ignore any proletarian apocalypses that might be envisioned here or there.

  As to the world’s agenda, Naphta sarcastically replied, Herr Settembrini did not appear very well informed about that. A matter that the Italian evidently preferred to take for granted would be the next item on that agenda: whether the classical tradition of the Mediterranean was intended for all humanity, and therefore eternal in human terms, or whether it had not merely been the intellectual fashion and trimmings of one particular epoch, the bourgeois liberal age, which could then die with it. It would be a matter for history to decide, and he recommended Herr Settembrini not let himself be lulled into any son of certainty that the decision would be rendered in favor of his Latin conservatism.

  It was a particular bit of impudence on little Naphta’s part to call Herr Settembrini, the declared servant of progress, a conservative. They all felt it—most bitterly, of course, the gentleman in question, who twirled his sweeping moustaches while he searched for a counterblow, giving his foe time to engage in further attacks against classical models, against the rhetorical literary tradition of European education and schooling, with its mania for grammatical form, which only served the interests of bourgeois class domination and had long since become an object of ridicule among the masses. Yes, these gentlemen had no idea what a huge joke all our doctor degrees, our whole mandarin educational system, was to the masses, how they ridiculed our public grammar schools, that instrument of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, maintained under the delusion that by watering down scholarship one educated the commonfolk. The masses had long since learned that for the education and discipline needed in the battle against the decaying bourgeoisie they should look elsewhere than to coercive schools imposed by the authorities; and by now every idiot knew that the school system developed from the cloisters of the Middle Ages was as anachronistic and absurd as a periwig, that no one owed his real education to schools anymore, and that free, open instruction by public lectures, exhibitions, films, and so forth was far superior to that found in any schoolroom.

  In the mixture of revolution and conspiracy that Naphta had served up to his hearers, Herr Settembrini responded, the obscurantist element had predominated in a most unsavory fashion. Although one found pleasure in Naphta’s concern for the enlightenment of the common people, that pleasure was diminished somewhat by the fear that what prevailed here was an instinctual tendency to shroud the commonfolk and the world in illiterate darkness.

  Naphta smiled. Illiteracy! And now Settembrini had spoken the word he evidently believed would instill true terror, had held up the Gorgon’s head at the sight of which everyone would dutifully turn ashen. He, Naphta, regretted having to disappoint his vis-à-vis, for he found the humanist fear of the very word “illiteracy” merely amusing. One would have to be a Renaissance man of letters, a verbal dandy, a Gongorist, a Marinist, a fop of the estilo culto, to endow the disciplines of reading and writing with such exaggerated educational importance and imagine that intellectual night reigned where such skills were lacking. Did Herr Settembrini not recall that the greatest poet of the Middle Ages, Wolfram von Eschenbach, had been illiterate? In those days it was thought disgraceful to send to school any lad who did not wish to become a cleric, and this scorn for the literary arts, on the part of the aristocracy and commonfolk alike, had remained the hallmark of genuine nobility; whereas the literary man, that true son of humanism and the bourgeoisie, who could read and write—which nobles, warriors, and common people could do only poorly or not at all—could do nothing else, understood absolutely nothing about the world, and remained a Latin windbag, a master of speech, who left real life to honest folk, which was why he had also turned politics into a bag of wind, full of rhetoric and beautiful literature, called radicalism and democracy in party jargon, and so on and so forth.

  And here came Herr Settembrini! His opponent’s contempt for the love of literary form, he cried, only too plainly revealed a taste for the frenzied barbarism of certain epochs, but without such a love no true humanity was possible, or even conceivable, not now, not ever. Nobility? Only a misanthrope could christen the lack of the Word—raw, mute reality itself—with such a name. Nobility was, rather, a certain lofty abundance, generosità, which revealed itself by ascribing to form a human value quite independent of content; the cultivation of public speaking as an art for art’s sake, this legacy of Greco-Roman civilization, which humanists, the uomini letterati, had restored for those who spoke Romance languages, for them at least, was the source of every further meaningful idealism, including political idealism. “Yes, my good sir. What you would like to revile as the disjuncture of speech and life is nothing more than a higher unity in beauty’s crown, and I have no fear which side high-minded youth will always take in a struggle where the choice is between literature and barbarism.”

  Hans Castorp’s attention had been directed only partly to the conversation, for he was preoccupied with the presence of a warrior, of a person who was the representative of genuine nobility, or rather with the new look in that person’s eyes, and he flinched at Herr Settembrini’s last words, sensing that they had been addressed to him and demanded an answer; but then he merely made the same face he had made the day Settembrini had solemnly tried to force him to decide between “East and West”—a face, that is, full of reservations and obstinacy—and said nothing. They carried everything to extremes, these two, as was probably necessary for the sake of argument, and squabbled fiercely over the most extreme choices, whereas it seemed to him that what one might, in a spirit of conciliation, declare truly human or humane had to lie somewhere in the middle of this intolerant contentiousness, somewhere between rhetorical humanism and illiterate barbarism. But to avoid annoying either man, he did not say this, and watched, wrapped in reservations, as they went at it, spitefully helping one another to get lost in a thousand trivialities, all because Settembrini had made a little joke about Virgil the Latin poet.

  The Italian would not yield, but brandished the Word like a sword, triumphed with it. He rose up to defend literary genius, celebrated the history of literature from the first moment when man chiseled symbols into stone as a monument to his knowledge and emotion. He spoke of the Egyptian god Thoth, identical with the Hellenistic god Hermes the Thrice Great, and worshiped as the inventor of writing, the patron of libraries, the inspiration for all intellectual endeavor. He bent a metaphorical knee before Hermes Trismegistos, the humanistic Hermes, the master of the palaestra, whom mankind could thank for the sublime gift of the literary word, of agonistic rhetoric. All of which roused Hans Castorp to remark that this Egyptian must have been a politician as well, playing on a grander scale the same role as Signor Brunetto Latini, who had given the Florentines their polish and taught them how to speak and the fine art of guiding their republic by the rules of politics. To which Naphta responded that Herr Settembrini was cheating a little and had given his Thoth Trismegistos all too sleek an image. For he had been a monkey, moon, and soul god—a baboon with a crescent moon above his head and above all, under the name of Hermes, a god of death and the dead, a grabber and guide of souls, who by late antiquity had become a great sorcerer and served the cabalistic Middle Ages as the father of hermetic alchemy.

  What, what? Thoughts and images tumbled topsy-turvy in Hans’s mental workshop. There sat death, a humanistic rhetorician clad in a blue coat; and when you focused on this philanthropic and pedagogic god of literature, what you saw crouching there had a monkey face, with the symbols of night and sorcery on its brow. He resisted the image, waved it off with one hand, with which he then covered his eyes. But in the darkness into which he fled to escape confusion, he could hear Settembrini’s voice droning on in praise of literature. Not just the great thinkers, he exclaimed, but the great doers in every age as well, had been part of literature; and he named Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon, named
Frederick the Prussian and other heroes, even Lassalle and Moltke. It did not trouble him in the least when Naphta tried to send him packing to China, a land afflicted with the most bizarre idolatry of the ABC’s ever known to history, where you could become a field marshal if you could sketch all forty thousand characters—which surely had to warm the humanist’s heart. Eh, eh, Naphta knew quite well that he wasn’t talking about sketching, but about literature as the basic impulse of humanity, about the human spirit, which, mock as he might, was spirit per se, the miracle uniting analysis and form. That was what awakened our appreciation for all things human, weakened and dispelled foolish prejudices and beliefs, led to the civilizing ennoblement and improvement of humankind. And it did so by creating highly refined morals and sensitivities, while at the same time, and without any fanaticism, teaching healthy doubt, justice, and tolerance. The purifying, sanctifying effect of literature, the destruction of passions through knowledge and the Word; literature as the path to understanding, to forgiveness, and to love; the redemptive power of language, the literary spirit as the noblest manifestation of the human spirit per se; the man of letters as the perfect man, the saint—such were the radiant tones of Herr Settembrini’s hymn of apology. Ah, but his adversary was not tongue-tied, either; he knew how to disrupt this angelic hallelujah with nasty, brilliant protests, declaring himself a partisan of life and its conservation and an opponent of the spirit of sedition lurking beneath such seraphic dissemblance. The miraculous unification that Herr Settembrini had warbled on about, so he declared, was a sham, a sleight-of-hand trick, because form, which the literary spirit was so proud of uniting with principles of inquiry and discrimination, was merely a form of illusion and lies, not a genuine, natural form growing out of life. This so-called benefactor of mankind talked a fine game about purification and sanctification, but in fact he was bent upon the emasculation of life, wanted to let it bleed to death. Yes, his spirit, his zealous theory violated life itself, and whoever wanted to destroy passions wanted nothingness, pure nothingness—pure indeed, since “pure” was the only attribute that could still be attached to nothingness. And it was precisely there that Herr Settembrini revealed himself for what he truly was, the man of progress, of liberalism, of bourgeois revolution. For progress was pure nihilism, and the liberal bourgeois was in truth a man of nothingness and the Devil—yes, he denied God, the conservative, positive Absolute, and instead pledged allegiance to the devilish Anti-Absolute, and in his deadly pacifism marveled at how devout he was. Yet he was anything but devout, was a traitor to life, who deserved to be brought before the Inquisition and the Fehme, to be put to the painful question—et cetera.