“
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 today 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.”