THOMAS MANN
S3
the lowlands.
As
champion of science, progress, and the glory of the
individual, the heir of the Garibaldian
risorgimento
stands for values
that cannot but be sympathetic to Hans Castorp; but they are ren–
dered suspect by the diseased medium through which they are de–
fended: rhetoric is made to seem like an elephantiasis of the intellect,
in which words are swollen too large for their meaning. The humanist,
exalts above all else the art of letters, in which man was first able to
engrave
his
word-symbols on stone, but it is necessary to point out to
him that its tutelary gods, Thoth and Hermes-Trismegistus, became in
time transformed into soul-guides in the land 9f the dead. So also does
everyone of Settembrini's most positive conceptions become trans–
formed into its opposite, dissolve into pure nothingness, in the hard
light of its historical application: the beneficent and liberating aspect
of science is cancelled out by the infernal uses to which it has been
put in the modern world; progress is another name for the deathward–
moving direction of the romantic will; and the rights of the individual
are translatable as the right of one class of individuals to exploit an–
other and less fortunate class.
If
Settembrini on his mountain-top does
not suspect that he is living a hundred years too late it is because of
the natural coloration that language supplies the mind in its contacts
with experience. But to Hans at the end he must appear for what
he is- a wind-bag, an organ-grinder, a Philistine "forever playing on
his
penny-pipe of reason."
Yet his bombastic humanism, which is after all the reflection of
a certain geniality of soul, is never so offensive as the "analphabetic
barbarism" purveyed by that other distortion of the Apollonian-the
little Jewish Jesuit, Naphta. Even in his name the latter gives off a
suggestion of the suffocating odor left by his volatile and inflammable
mixture of scholasticism and Marxism. For it is no true dialectical
reconciliation between reason and nature that he achieves in his
famous "synthesis" of the two doctrines : it is once again reason breed–
ing on itself, seeking its proofs in its own already elaborated structures
of dogma, without bothering to check either of these with an ever
changing world of reality. It is another example of the terrible incest
of the spirit. And from such a sterile union nothing can be born but the
vague "Terror" that Naphta envisages for the future. (For readers
living in that future, of course, the terror has long since lost its char–
acter of vagueness.)
As
the hyperbolic effusions of Settembrini had
seemed like a burlesque of language, the traditional medium of reason,
Naphta's cobwebby arguments are like a macabre parody of logic,
its form. They are like those "uncanny, anti-organic, life-denying"
patterns which Hans is to discover in the snowflakes later on and
which will represent for him the very marrow of death. It is this
genuine sclerosis of the intellect that makes him, in the last analysis,
