The Magic Mountain (27 page)

Settembrini spoke of his grandfather, a Milanese lawyer, but even more a patriot; with something of the political agitator, and orator and journalist to boot. He too, like his grandson, had always been in the opposition; though he had been able to perform his rôle upon a larger stage than had Ludovico. The latter remarked with some bitterness that his own activities had been confined to heckling and castigating the follies and frailties of the guests at the International Sanatorium Berghof, and to protesting against them in the name of the free and joyous human spirit. But his grandfather had had his finger in the forming of governments; he had conspired against Austria and the Holy Alliance, which had dismembered his native land and then held it in the heavy bond of servitude; he had been a zealous member of certain secret societies that had spread over Italy—a
carbonaro
, Settembrini explained, suddenly dropping his voice, as though it might still be dangerous to utter the word. In fact, from his grandson’s narrative, the two hearers got a picture of a dark and tempest-tossed figure, a ringleader, political agitator, and conspirator; despite all their pains, they did not quite succeed in hiding a feeling of mistrust, even repulsion. True, the circumstances had been extraordinary. What they heard had happened long ago, almost a hundred years. It was history; and they were familiar in theory—particularly from ancient history—with the traditional figure of the tyrant-hater and liberator, such as they now heard of—though they had never dreamed of being brought into actual human contact with him, like this! Settembrini’s grandfather, so they were told, united with his conspiratorial zeal a profound love for his native land, which it was his dream to see free and united; indeed, it was out of this very combination, as a natural consequence, that his revolutionary activities flowed—and how strange this mingling of rebellion and patriotism seemed to the cousins, in whose minds an abiding sense of order was on an equal footing with their love of country! But they privately admitted, none the less, that at that time, and in that situation, it might have been conceivably possible that rebellion should go paired with civic virtue, and law-abiding-ness lie down with lazy indifference to the public weal.

But Grandfather Giuseppe had been not only an Italian patriot. He had been fellow citizen and brother-in-arms to any people struggling for its liberties. Thus after the shipwreck of a certain plot hatched in Turin for the overthrow of the military and civil government, a plot in which he had been deeply involved, he had escaped by a hair’s breadth the clutches of Metternich’s hirelings, and spent the time of his exile fighting and bleeding, first in Spain for the cause of constitutionalism, then in Greece for the independence of the Hellenic peoples. It was in Greece that Settembrini’s father had seen the light—which probably accounted for his being a humanist and lover of classical antiquity. His mother had been of German stock; Settembrini had married her in Switzerland and taken her about with him in his further adventurous career. He had been allowed, after ten years of exile, to return to Milan, where he had practised his profession, without for a moment ceasing to labour, with voice and pen, in verse and prose, for the establishment of a united republic, and to draw up subversive programmes characterized by dictatorial ardour, in which were promulgated in the clearest style the unification of the liberated people and the attainment of general felicity. One detail mentioned by the grandson made a profound impression upon Hans Castorp: Grandfather Giuseppe, to the day of his death, wore black—in token, he said, of his mourning for the state of the fatherland, languishing in misery and servitude. Hans Castorp, at this piece of information, thought of his own grandfather, as he had once or twice before during Settembrini’s narrative. He too, for as long as his grandson had known him, wore black clothes. But for how different a reason! Hans Lorenz Castorp had worn the quaint old fashion to indicate his oneness with a bygone time and his essential lack of sympathy with the present; worn it up to the end of his days, when he had returned in death to his true and adequate presentment—with the starched ruff. Certainly these were two strikingly different kinds of grandfather! Hans Castorp pondered, his eyes fixed in a stare, cautiously shaking his head in a way that might as well be taken for a sign of admiration for Giuseppe Settembrini as for the opposite. He honourably refrained from judging what he did not understand, but simply made mental note of the contrast and let it go at that. He could see the narrow head of old Hans Lorenz, as it bent musing over the pale gold rim of the christening basin, that symbol of the passing and the abiding, of continuity through change. He had his mouth open; Hans Castorp knew the words great-great-great were about to issue from it, the sombre syllables which always reminded him of places where one walked with bent head and reverent gait. And then he saw Giuseppe Settembrini, with the tricolour on his arm, waving his sabre and breathing a vow to Heaven with dark gaze flung aloft, as he stormed the heights of despotism at the head of a liberty-loving host. Well, he thought, each of them had his fine and splendid side—he made the greater effort to be fair, because he knew himself to be partisan, on personal or partly personal grounds. For Grandfather Settembrini had fought to obtain political rights; whereas the other grandfather—or his ancestors—had originally had all the rights, and the scoundrels had taken them away from him, in the course of the centuries, by violence or pettifoggery. So both grandfathers had worn mourning, the one in the north and the one in the south, and both in the same idea; namely, to put a great gulf between them and the evil present. But whereas the one had assumed it in token of his pious reverence for the past and the dead, to whom he felt himself with his whole being to belong, the other had worn it as a sign of rebellion, in the name of progress, and in a spirit of hostility toward the past. Yes, these were two different worlds. As Herr Settembrini talked, and Hans Castorp stood, as it were, between them and cast his critical eye upon one and upon the other, they called back to his conscious mind a scene from his own past life. He saw himself rowing on a lake in Holstein, one late summer evening; the sun was down, the almost full moon rising above the bushes that bordered the lake. He rowed alone and slowly over the quiet waters, gazing to right and left at a scene fantastic as any dream. In the west it was still broad day, with a fixed and glassy air; but in the east he looked into a moonlit landscape, wreathed in the magic of rising mists and equally convincing to his bewildered sense. The strange combination lasted some brief quarter-hour before the balance finally settled in favour of night and the moon; all that time Hans Castorp’s dazzled eyes went shifting in lively amazement from one scene to the other: from day to night and back again to day. The picture returned to him now.

At the same time the thought crossed his mind that Lawyer Settembrini could scarcely have been much of a jurist, considering his other occupations and the extended sphere of his activities. His grandson asseverated, however, and Hans Castorp found it credible, that the grandfather had been from early childhood down to the last day of his life inspired by the fundamental principle of justice. Our hero, all heavy-headed as he was and organically preoccupied by the six-course Berghof meal he had just eaten, made an effort to understand what Settembrini meant when he called this principle “the source and fount of liberty and progress.” Progress, up to now, had had to do, in Hans Castorp’s mind, with such things as the nineteenthcentury development of cranes and lifting-tackle. He was accordingly gratified to learn that Grandfather Settembrini had not underestimated the importance of such matters. Of course, his own grandfather hadn’t either. The Italian paid a tribute to the native land of his two listeners, for the inventions of gunpowder—whereby the armour of feudalism had been thrown on the scrap-heap—and the printing-press, which had made possible the democratic propagation of ideas, and the propagation of democratic ideas, which were one and the same. For these good gifts he praised Germany; praised her for her past, but awarded his own country the palm, because she had been the first to unfurl the banner of freedom, culture, and enlightenment, at a time when all other lands were wrapped in the darkness of superstition and slavery. Yet in paying due honour, as upon their first meeting, at the bench by the watercourse, to commerce and technology (Hans Castorp’s own field), Settembrini apparently did so not for the sake of these forces themselves, but purely with reference to their significance for the ethical development of mankind. For such a significance, he declared, he joyfully ascribed to them. Technical progress, he said, gradually subjugated nature, by developing roads and telegraphs, minimizing climatic differences; and by the means of communication which it created proved itself the most reliable agent in the task of drawing together the peoples of the earth, of making them acquainted with each other, of building bridges to compromise, of destroying prejudice; of, actually, bringing about the universal brotherhood of man. Humanity had sprung from the depths of fear, darkness, and hatred; but it was emerging, it was moving onward and upward, toward a goal of fellow-feeling and enlightenment, of goodness and joyousness; and upon this path, he said, the industrial arts were the vehicle conducive to the greatest progress. But all this made a confused impression on Hans Castorp. Herr Settembrini seemed to bring together in a single breath categories which in the young man’s mind had heretofore been as the poles asunder—for example, technology and morals! Positively, he made the statement that Christ had been the first to proclaim the principle of equality and union, that the printing-press had propagated the doctrine, and that finally the French Revolution had elevated it into a law! All which our poor young friend found very muddling, he scarce knew why— though the feeling was definite enough in all conscience, and though Herr Settembrini had couched his thought in the clearest and roundest of periods. Once, the Italian went on, once only in his life, and that in his early manhood, had his grandfather known what it was to feel profound joy. That was at the time of the Paris July Revolution. He had gone about proclaiming to all and sundry that some day men would place those three days alongside the six days of creation, and reverence them alike. Hans Castorp felt utterly dumbfounded—involuntarily he slapped the table with his hand. To compare those three summer days of the year 1830 when the Parisians had taken unto themselves a new constitution, to the six in which God had divided the land from the water and created the lights in the firmament of heaven, as well as flowers, trees, birds, and fishes, and all other living things—that seemed to him to be going too far. He talked it over later with Cousin Joachim, and gave clear expression to his opinion that it really was pretty thick, that he, Hans Castorp, for his part, found it positively offensive.

But still open-minded—at least in the sense that he enjoyed the experiment he was making—he restrained the objections which his sense of fitness would have raised against the Settembrinian scheme of things. Restrained them on the theory that what seemed sedition to him might to another seem dauntless courage; and what he called bad taste might have been, in that far-off time and circumstance, but a display of the noble excesses of a high-hearted nature—for instance, when Grandfather Settembrini called the barricades “the people’s throne,” and talked about “dedicating the burgher’s pike on the altar of humanity.”

Hans Castorp knew—without putting it into so many words—why he lent an ear to Herr Settembrini. Partly it was out of a sense of duty; though also out of that holiday mood of taking everything as it came, rejecting nothing, in the knowledge that in another day or so he would spread his wings and fly back to the wonted order of things. Yes, he knew it was largely the promptings of conscience to which he hearkened; to be precise, the promptings of a conscience not altogether easy—as he sat listening to the Italian, one leg crossed over the other, drawing at his Maria Mancini; or when the three of them climbed the hill from the English quarter. Two principles, according to the Settembrinian cosmogony, were in perpetual conflict for possession of the world: force and justice, tyranny and freedom, superstition and knowledge; the law of permanence and the law of change, of ceaseless fermentation issuing in progress. One might call the first the Asiatic, the second the European principle; for Europe was the theatre of rebellion, the sphere of intellectual discrimination and transforming activity, whereas the East embodied the conception of quiesence and immobility. There was no doubt as to which of the two would finally triumph: it would be the power of enlightenment, the power that made for rational advance and development. For human progress snatched up ever more peoples with it on its brilliant course; it conquered more and more territory in Europe itself and was already pressing Asia-wards. Much still remained to be done, sublime exertions were still demanded from those spirits who had received the light. Then only the day would come when thrones would crash and outworn religions crumble, in those remaining countries of Europe which had not already enjoyed the blessings of eighteenth-century enlightenment, nor yet of an upheaval like 1789. But the day would come, Settembrini said, with his suave smile; it would come, he repeated, if not on the wings of doves, then on the pinions of eagles; and dawn would break over Europe, the dawn of universal brotherhood, in the name of justice, science, and human reason. It would bring in its train a new Holy Alliance, the alliance of the democratic peoples of Europe, in opposition to that other Holy Alliance, the thrice-infamous organ of princes and cabinets, which Grandfather Giuseppe had personally regarded as his deadly foe; in a word, it would bring in its train the republic of the world. But before that could happen, the Asiatic principle must be met and crushed in its very stronghold and vital centre; that was to say, in Vienna. Austria must be crushed, crushed and dismembered, first to take vengeance for the past, and second to lead in the new law of justice with truth on earth.