The Magic Mountain (63 page)

“Oh, you, with your Cassandra prophecies!” Settembrini parried. “Nicholas is a lover of peace. We owe him the Hague conferences, which will always be moral events of the first order.”

“Yes, Russia must give herself time to recover from her little mishap in the East.”

“Fie, sir! Why should you scoff at human nature’s yearning for social amelioration? A people that thwarts such aspirations exposes itself to moral obloquy. ‘

Naphta shrugged his shoulders, which were not quite even—in fact, to add to his ugliness, he was probably a little warped. He disdained to reply, and Settembrini pronounced judgment: “At all events, what you say is cynical. You see nothing but political trickery in the lofty exertions of democracy to fulfil itself internationally—” “Where you would like me to see idealism or even religiosity. What I
do
see is the last feeble stirrings of the instinct of self-preservation, the last remnant at the command of a condemned world-system. The catastrophe will and must come—it advances on every hand and in every way. Take the British policy. England’s need to secure the Indian glacis is legitimate. But what will be the consequences of it? Edward knows as well as you and I that Russia has to make good her losses in Manchuria, and that internal peace is as necessary to her as daily bread. Yet—he probably can’t help himself—he forces her to look westward for expansion, stirs up slumbering rivalries between St. Petersburg and Vienna—”

“Oh, Vienna! Your interest in that ancient obstruction is due, I presume, to the fact that her decaying empire is a sort of mummy, as it were, of the Holy Roman Empire of the German people.”

“While you, I suppose, are Russophil out of humanistic affinity with Cæsaropapism.

“Democracy, my friend, has more to hope from the Kremlin than she has from the Hofburg; and it is disgraceful for the country of Luther and Gutenberg—”

“It is probably not only disgraceful, but stupid into the bargain. But even this stupidity is an instrument of fate—”

“Oh, spare me your talk about fate! Human reason needs only to will more strongly than fate, and she
is
fate!” “One always wills one’s fate. Capitalistic Europe is willing hers.”

“One believes in the coming of war if one does not sufficiently abhor it.”

“Your abhorrence of war is logically disjointed if you do not make the state itself your point of departure.”

“The national state is the temporal principle, which you would like to ascribe to the evil one. But when nations are free and equal, when the small and weak are safeguarded from aggression, when there is justice in the world, and national boundaries—”

“Yes, I know, the Brenner frontier. The liquidation of Austria. If I only knew how you expect to bring that about without war!”

“No, here I must really corroborate Herr Settembrini,” Hans Castorp mixed in the dispute, which he had been following as they went, regarding attentively each speaker in turn, with his head on one side. “My cousin and I have had the privilege of frequent conversations with him on this and kindred subjects—what it amounted to, of course, was that we listened while he explained and developed his views—so I can vouch for the fact, and my cousin here will confirm me, that Herr Settembrini spoke more than once, with great enthusiasm, of the revolutionary principle, and about rebellion and reform—which is no very peaceful principle, I should think—and of the mighty efforts still to be made before it triumphs everywhere, and the great universal worldrepublic can come into being. Those were his words, though of course it sounded much more plastic and literary as he said it. But the part I have the most exact memory of, and have retained quite literally, because being a thorough-going civilian I found it quite alarming, was that he said the day would come, if not on the wings of doves, then on the pinions of eagles—it was the eagles’ pinions I was startled at—and that Vienna must be brought low before peace and prosperity could ensue. So it is not possible to say that Herr Settembrini condemned war as such. Am I right, Herr Settembrini?”

“More or less,” said the Italian shortly, twirling his cane, with averted head.

“Too bad,” Naphta smiled maliciously. “There you are, convicted of warlike inclinations out of the mouth of your own pupil. ‘
Assument pennas ut aqailæ’
—” “Voltaire himself approved of a war for civilization, and advised Frederick to fight Turkey.”

“Instead of which, he allied himself with her—he he! And then the world-republic! I refrain from asking what becomes of the principle of revolt when peace and prosperity have once been brought about. For it is plain that from that moment rebellion becomes a crime—”

“You know quite well, as do these young men here, that we are dealing with a progress in human affairs conceived of as endless.”

“But all motion is in circles,” said Hans Castorp. “In space and time, as we learn from the law of periodicity and the conservation of mass. My cousin and I were talking about it lately. How then can progress be conceived of, in closed motion without constant direction? When I lie in the evening and look at the zodiac—that is, the half of it that is visible to us—and think about the wise men of antiquity—” “You ought not to brood and dream, Engineer,” Settembrini interrupted him. “You must resolve to trust to the instincts of your youth and your blood, urging you in the direction of action. And also your training in natural science is bound to link you to progressive ideas. You see, through the space of countless ages, life developing from infusorium up to man: how can you doubt, then, that man has yet before him endless possibilities of development? And in the sphere of the higher mathematics, if you would rest your case thereon, then follow your cycle from perfection to perfection, and, from the teaching of our eighteenth century, learn that man was originally good, happy, and without sin, that social errors have corrupted and perverted him, and that he can and will once more become good, happy, and sinless, by dint of labour upon his social structure—”

“Herr Settembrini has omitted to add,” broke in Naphta, “that the Rousseauian idyll is a sophisticated transmogrification of the Church’s doctrine of man’s original free and sinless state, his primal nearness and filial relation to God; to which state he must finally return. But the re-establishment of the City of God, after the dissolution of all earthly forms, lies at the meeting-place of the earthly and the heavenly, the material and the spiritual; redemption is transcendental—and as for your capitalistic worldrepublic, my dear Doctor, it is odd in this connexion to hear you talking about instinct. The instinctive is entirely on the side of the national. God Himself has implanted in men’s breasts the instinct which bids them separate into states. War—”

“War,” echoed Settembrini, “war, my dear sir, has been forced before now to serve the cause of progress; as you will grant if you will recall certain events in the history of your favourite epoch—I mean the period of the Crusades. These wars for civilization stimulated economic and commercial relations between peoples, and united Western humanity in the name of an idea.”

“And how tolerant you always are towards an idea! I would the more courteously remind you that the effect of the Crusades and the economic relations they stimulated was anything but favourable to internationalism. On the contrary, they taught the peoples to become conscious of themselves, and thus furthered the development of the national idea.”

“Right; that is to say, right in so far as it was a question of the relation between the peoples and the priesthood; for it was indeed at that time that the mounting consciousness of national honour began to harden itself against hieratical presumption—”

“Though what you call hieratical presumption is nothing else than the conception of human unity in the name of the Spirit!” “We are familiar with that spirit—and we have no great love for it.”

“Your mania for nationalism obviously shrinks from the world-conquering cosmopolitanism of the Church. Still, I cannot see how you reconcile your nationalism with your horror of war. Because your obsolescent cult of the State must make you a champion of a positive conception of law, and as such—”

“Oh, if we are talking about law—the conceptions of natural law and universal human reason have survived, my dear sir, in international law.”

“Pshaw, your international law is only another Rousseauian transmogrification of the
ius divinum
, which has nothing in common with either nature or human reason, resting as it does upon revelation—”

“Let us not quarrel over names, Professor! What I call natural and international law, you are free to call the
ius divinum
. The important thing is that above the explicit jurisprudence of national states there rises a higher jurisdiction, empowered to decide between conflicting interests by means of courts of arbitration.”

“Courts of arbitration! The very name is idiotic! In a civil court, to pronounce upon matters of life and death, communicate the will of God to man, and decide the course of history!—Well, so much for the ‘wings of doves.’ Now for the ‘eagles’ pinions’— what about them?” “Civilian society—”

“Oh, society doesn’t know what it wants. It shouts for a campaign against the fall in the birth-rate, it demands a reduction in the cost of bringing up children and training them to a profession—and meanwhile men are herded like cattle, and all the trades and professions are so overcrowded that the fight round the feeding-trough puts in the shade the horrors of past wars. Open spaces, garden cities! Strengthening the stock! But why strengthen it, if civilization and progress have decided there shall be no more war? Whereas war would cure everything—it would ‘strengthen the stock’ and at the same time stop the decline in the birth-rate.”

“You are joking, of course—you can’t mean what you say. And our discussion comes to an end at the right moment, for here we are,” Settembrini said, and pointed out to the cousins with his stick the cottage before whose gate they had paused. It stood near the beginning of the village: a modest structure, separated from the street by a narrow front garden. A wild grape-vine, springing from bare roots at the door, flung an arm along the ground-floor wall towards the display window of a tiny shop. The ground-floor, Settembrini explained, belonged to the chandler; Naphta was domiciled a floor higher up, with the tailor’s shop, and his own quarters were in the roof, where he had a peaceful little study.

Naphta, with unexpectedly spontaneous cordiality, expressed the hope that he might have the pleasure of meeting them again. “Come and see us,” he said. “I would say: ‘Come and see me,’ if Dr. Settembrini here had not prior claims upon your friendship. Come, however, as often as you like, whenever you feel you would like a talk. I prize highly an interchange of ideas with youth, and am perhaps not entirely without pedagogic tradition. Our Master of the Lodge here”—he nodded toward Settembrini—”would have it that the bourgeois humanism of the day has a monopoly of the pedagogic gift; but we must take issue with him. Until another time, then!” Settembrini made difficulties—there
were
difficulties, he said. The days of the Lieutenant’s sojourn up here were numbered; and as for the Engineer, he would doubtless redouble his zeal in the service of the cure, in order to follow his cousin down to the valley with all the speed he might.

Both young men assented in turn. They had bowed their acceptance of Herr Naphta’s invitation, and next minute they also bowed their acknowledgment of the justice of Herr Settembrini’s remarks. So everything was left open.

“What did he call him?” asked Joachim, as they climbed the winding path to the Berghof.

“I understood him to say ‘Master of the Lodge,’ ” answered Hans Castorp. “I was just wondering about it. It was probably some joke or other, they have such odd names for each other. Settembrini called Naphta ‘
princeps scholasticorum’—
not so bad, either. The schoolmen were the theologians of the Middle Ages, the dogmatic philosophers, if you like. They spoke several times of the Middle Ages; it reminded me of the first day I came, when Settembrini said there was a good deal up here that was mediæval—it was Adriatica von Mylendonk, her name, I mean, made him say so.—How did you like him?”

“Who? The little man? Not very much. Though he said some things I liked. That about courts of arbitration—they
are
nothing but canting hypocrisy, of course. But I did not care much for the man himself—a person may say as many good things as he likes, it doesn’t matter to me, if he himself is a queer fish. And queer he is, you can’t deny it. That stuff about the ‘place of intercourse’ was distinctly shady, not to mention anything else. And did you see the big Jewish nose he had? Nobody but Jews have such puny figures. Are you really thinking of visiting the man?”

“Visit him—of course we’ll visit him,” declared Hans Castorp. “When you talk about his being puny, that’s only the military in you speaking. And as for his nose, the Chaldeans had the same kind, and they knew devilish well what they were about, on more subjects than alchemy. Naphta has something of the mystagogue about him, he interests me a good deal. I won’t say that I make him out altogether, yet, but if we meet him often perhaps we shall; I don’t think it at all unlikely we may learn something from the acquaintance with him.”

“Oh, you, with your learning! Getting wiser all the time, with your biology, and your botany, and your continual changing from one idea to another! You began philosophizing about time the first day you came. But we didn’t come up here to acquire wisdom. We came to acquire health, to get healthier and healthier until we are entirely well, and are free to quit, and go down below where we belong!”