The Magic Mountain (74 page)

At this point Anton Karlowitsch Ferge girded his loins to remonstrate—he defended the pleura-shock against sneers and contumely. So Herr Settembrini thought you could take the pleura-shock too seriously, did he? With all due respect and gratitude and all that, he, Ferge, must really beg Herr Settembrini’s pardon! His great Adam’s apple and his good-natured moustaches worked up and down as he repudiated any lack of respect for the sufferings he had undergone. He was just a plain man, an insurance agent, with no high-falutin ideas; even the present conversation soared far above his head. But if Herr Settembrini meant to suggest that the pleura-shock was a good example of what he was talking about—that torture by tickling, with its stench of sulphur and its three-coloured fainting fit—well, really he was very much obliged to Herr Settembrini, he really must thank him very kindly indeed; but there had been nothing of the sort about the pleura-shock—not it! Talk about adjustments and “merciful narcosis”—why, it had been the most sickening piece of business under the shining sun, and nobody who had not been through it could have the least idea— “Yes, yes,” Herr Settembrini said. Herr Ferge’s collapse got more and more remarkable as time went on, and he would presently be wearing it like a halo round his head. He, Settembrini, had no great respect for sick folk who laid claim to consideration on the score of their illness. He was ill himself, and seriously; but in all sincerity he felt inclined to be ashamed of the fact. However, his present remarks were purely abstract and impersonal; and the distinction he made between the nature and reactions of a well and a sick man was based on common sense, as the gentlemen would see if they would think about insanity—take, for instance, hallucinations. Suppose one of his companions, the Engineer, say, or Herr Wehsal, should enter his room to-night at dusk and see his deceased father sitting there in a corner, who should look at and speak to him—that would be absolutely monstrous, wouldn’t it? A shattering experience, which would confound both sense and reason, and make him get out of the room as fast as he could and put himself in the care of a specialist in nervous ailments. Or wouldn’t it? The joke of the thing was that such an experience would not be possible for any of the gentlemen present, since they were all in enjoyment of full mental health. If it did happen to any of them, it would be a sure sign that they were
not
sound, but diseased, and they would not react to the appearance with emotions of horror and by taking to their heels, but treat it as though it were entirely in order, and begin a conversation with it—this being, in fact, the reaction of a person suffering from a hallucination. To suppose that such hallucinations affected the person subject to them with the same horror as would be felt by a sound mind was a defect of the imagination to which normal persons were often prone.

Herr Settembrini spoke with droll and plastic effect. His picture of the father in the corner made them all laugh, even Ferge, put out though he was by the slight to his pleura-shock. Herr Settembrini took advantage of their hilarity to expatiate further on the contemptibleness of people who were subject to hallucinations, and of
pazzi
in general. It was his opinion that these people gave way a great deal more than they need, and often had it in their power to control their own freakishness. He had made this observation when he had visited asylums for the insane. For in the presence of the doctor, or of a stranger, the patients would mostly intermit their jabbering, grimaces, and weaving to and fro, and behave quite sensibly, as long as they felt themselves under scrutiny, only to let themselves go again afterwards. For lunacy undoubtedly in many cases meant the kind of self-abandonment which was the refuge of a weak nature against extreme distress, a defence against such overwhelming blows of destiny as it felt itself, when in its right mind, unable to cope with. But almost anybody might get in that state; and he, Settembrini, had held more than one lunatic to temporary self-control, simply by opposing to his humbuggery an air of inexorable reason.

Naphta laughed derisively; Hans Castorp protested his readiness to believe Herr Settembrini’s statement. Indeed, as he pictured him smiling beneath his moustaches and fixing the feeble-minded with the eye of remorseless reason, he could well understand how the poor fellow had had to pull himself together and behave with “temporary self-control,” though probably finding Herr Settembrini’s presence a most unwelcome incident.—But Naphta too had had experience of asylums for the insane. He recalled a visit to the violent ward, where he had seen such sights as—my God, such sights as would have been a bit too much even for Herr Settembrini’s intelligent eye or disciplinary powers: Dantesque scenes, monstrous tableaux of horror and agony: naked madmen squatting in the continuous bath, in every posture of mental anguish or in the stupor of despair; some shrieking aloud, others with uplifted arms and gaping mouths whence issued laughter that mingled all the elements of hell— “Aha,” cried Herr Ferge, and took leave to remind them of the laughter which had escaped him when they went over his pleura. In short, Herr Settembrini’s inexorable pedantry would have had to confess itself beaten before these sights in the violent ward; in the face of which, the shudder of religious awe would surely have been a more human reaction than this condescending twaddle about reason, which our Worshipful Brother and Eminent Preceptor saw fit to put forward as a treatment for insanity.

Hans Castorp was too preoccupied to question the new titles Naphta was conferring on Herr Settembrini. Hastily he made a resolve to look them up the first chance he got; for the moment, he had his hands full with the present conversation. Naphta was acrimoniously debating the general tendency which led the humanist to exalt health and cry down and belittle illness. Herr Settembrini’s attitude was, he thought, a remarkable, even admirable example of self-abnegation, considering he was ill himself. But the position, no matter how strikingly meritorious, was as mistaken as it could well be: resting as it did upon a respect and reverence for the human body which could only be justified if that body had remained in original sinlessness, instead of sinking to its present fallen state
(statu degradationis)
. For it had been created immortal, and by the original sins of depravity and abomination, by the degeneration of its nature, it had become mortal and corruptible, and was thus to be regarded as the prison-house and torture-chamber of the soul, or as the fit instrument for rousing the conscience to a sense of shame and confusion
(pudoris et confusionis sensum)
, as Saint Ignatius had it.

The humanist Plotinus, exclaimed Hans Castorp, was also known to have given expression to the same idea. But Herr Settembrini flung up his hands and ordered the young man not to confuse two different points of view—and, for the rest, to be advised and maintain an attitude of receptivity.

Naphta, continuing, derived the reverence which the Christian Middle Ages paid to physical suffering from the fact that it acquiesced on religious grounds in the sight of the anguish of the flesh. For the wounds of the body not only emphasized its sunken state, they also corresponded in the most edifying manner to the envenomed corruption of the soul, and thereby gave rise to emotions of true spiritual satisfaction: whereas blooming health was a misleading phenomenon, insulting to the conscience of man and requiring to be counteracted by an attitude of debasement and humility before physical infirmity, which was infinitely beneficial to the soul.
Quis me
liberabit de corpore mortis huius?
Who will deliver me from the body of this death? There spoke the voice of the spirit, which was eternally the voice of true humanity. On the contrary—according to Herr Settembrini’s view, presented with no little heat—it was a voice from the darkness, a voice from a world upon which the sun of reason and humanity was not yet risen. Truly, in his own physical person he was contaminate; yet what mattered that, since his mind was untainted and sound—and quite competent to bring confusion to his priestly opponent in any discussion touching the body, or to laugh him to scorn over the soul? He took too high a flight in celebrating the human body as the true temple of the Godhead; for Naphta straightway declared that this mortal fabric was nothing more than a veil between us and eternity; whereupon Settembrini definitely forbade him the use of the word humanity—and so it went on. Bare-headed, their faces stiff in the cold, they trod in their rubber galoshes the crisp, creaking, cinder-strewn snow, or ploughed through porous masses in the gutter: Settembrini in a winter jacket with beaver collar and cuffs—the fur was worn to the pelt, and looked fairly mangy, but he knew how to carry it off with an air; Naphta in a long black overcoat that came down to his heels and up to his ears, and showed none of the fur with which it was lined throughout. Both speakers treated their theme as of the utmost personal concern; and both often turned, not to each other but to Hans Castorp, with argument and exposition, referring to their opponents with a jerk of the head or thumb. They had him between them, and he turned his head to assent first to one and then to the other; now and again he stood stock-still on the path, tipping his body back from the waist and gesturing with his fur-lined glove as he made some quite inadequate contribution to the talk. Ferge and Wehsal circled about, now in front and now behind, now in a single row until they had to break up their line again to let people pass.

It was due to some remark of theirs that the debate took on a less abstract tone, and all the company joined in a discussion of torture, cremation and punishment—both capital and corporal. It was Ferdinand Wehsal who introduced the last-named; with obvious relish, Hans Castorp observed. As was to be expected, Herr Settembrini, in high-sounding words, invoked the dignity of the human race against a procedure whose results were as devastating in education as in penology. And equally to be ex pected, though rendered startling by a certain kind of gloomy ferocity, was Naphta’s approval of the bastinado. According to him, it was absurd to prate about human dignity, since true dignity indwelt not in the flesh but in the spirit. The soul of man was for ever prone to suck the joys of this earthly life from the flesh instead of the spirit; thus pain, by rendering bitter to him the things of the senses, was highly efficacious, driving him back to the spirit and giving the latter the mastery over the flesh. It was shallow to contend that the discipline of the whipping-post had anything particularly shameful about it. Saint Elizabeth had been flogged by her confessor, Conrad von Marburg, until the blood came, and by such means her soul was rapt “to the third choir of angels.” She herself, moreover, had beaten with rods an old woman who was too sleepy to make her confession. The members of a certain sect, and even other persons of devout and serious character, submitted to flagellation in order that the spiritual impulse might be strengthened. Would anyone seriously contend that such a procedure was barbarous and inhuman? It was true that corporal punishment was on the decline in certain countries which considered themselves in the van of progress: but the belief that such a decline was a sign of enlightenment became only the more comic the longer it persisted.

Well, anyhow, Hans Castorp considered, so much was granted: that in the antithesis between body and soul it was undoubtedly the body which embodied—the body embodied, that wasn’t so bad, was it?—the evil principle; in so far as the body was naturally nature—pretty good, too, that!—and nature, being diametrically opposed to the spirit and reason, was by that fact intrinsically evil—mystically evil, one might say, if it didn’t sound like showing off! But it followed from this that the body should be treated accordingly, and made to profit from disciplinary methods, which might also be called mystically evil. Herr Settembrini, for instance, that time when the weakness of the flesh had prevented him from attending the Congress for the Advancement of Civilization at Barcelona, ought to have had a Saint Elizabeth at his side—!

Everybody laughed; but while the humanist was bringing up his guns, Hans Castorp hastily began to talk about a beating he had once received, when he was in one of the lower forms in the gymnasium, where this form of punishment still survived to some extent, and there were always switches on hand. His, Hans Castorp’s social position had been too good for the masters to venture to lay hands on him; but he had once been whipped by a stronger pupil, a big lout of a fellow who had laid on with the flexible switch across Hans Castorp’s thin-stockinged calves. It had hurt so confoundedly—so “mystically”—that he had fairly sobbed for rage, and the tears had ignominiously flowed down. And he recalled having read that in the penitentiaries, when men are flogged, the most hardened reprobates will blubber like little children. Herr Settembrini hid his face in his hands, that were clad in very shabby leather gloves; and Naphta, with statesmanlike calm, asked how else they would expect to reduce refractory criminals—unless by putting in the stocks, which were quite the suitable furnishing for a prison. A humane penitentiary would be neither one thing nor the other, an æsthetic compromise: if Herr Settembrini did not think so, then it was clear that, though an æsthete, he had very little sense of the fitness of things. And in the field of education, a conception of human dignity which would bar corporal punishment from the schools had its roots, according to Naphta, in the liberalindividualism of our bourgeois, humanitarian age, in an enlightened absolutism of the ego, which was, indeed, now dying off, to give place to social conceptions made of sterner stuff: ideas of discipline and conformity, of coercion and compliance, to the realization of which an element of godly severity would be needful, and which, when realized, would make us alter all our ideas on the subject of the chastisement of the human carcass.

“Hence the phrase p
erinde ac si cadaver
,” scoffed Settembrini. Naphta suggested that since God, in punishment of our sins, had visited us with the shameful and horrible sentence of bodily corruption, after all it was not such a frightful insult to that same body that it should now and then get a flogging. And then, somehow, all at once, they came upon the subject of cremation.