MYTH AND HISTORY
31
found to consist
in
and to work towards an extreme, Peeperkom's
egotism is justified by its very exaggeration. "The whole thing
is
simply a question of scale.
If
a thing has size, one cannot call it vice."
Here Measure overshadows Value.
Peeperkom is a good-natured fellow, a grotesque daemon of
jolly parties and festive evenings. His originality has nothing in com–
mon with the esthetic-intellectual or sentimental-romantic quality
that cuts one off from society; on the contrary, he is gallant, garrulous,
and familiar. He exerts a fascination upon the inmates of the Berg–
hof which is inspiriting, blithe, and "civilizing." He broadens their
apprehensions and quickens their joy and reverence of life-truly,
a good mixer and the life of the party, in a manner which would
have been impossible to a Tanio Kruger. Under his influence, says
Mann, "they gave themselves over to a blissful
far niente
enlivened
by scraps of conversation in which, out of sheer high spirits, no one
hung back." A benign deity, he is the modem analogical agent of the
positive, life-furthering element of all religions: "Holy, holy, my
friends. In every sense, Christian and pagan."
The power of Peeperkom proceeds from within his own person–
ality. No explanation, psychological or social, is offered 'or his avoid–
ance of the vitiating and degrading dualisms. In Fernandez' terms,
his integrity is "guaranteed by an I know not what." Peeperkorn
overrides the fatal clash of feeling and reason without being com–
pelled to trade himself on the social exchange because he is himself
a sort of perfection of the common man, an archetype of the middle
road, a never-severed member of the group, to whom individuality
has
been added as an extra attribute. Comfortable and mighty in the
primitive-domestic tradition, he embodies as natural qualities all the
good things of the simple community existence, distributing their
benefits with the heightened enthusiasm of one who has seen them
blessed by beloved household gods-money, strength, joviality, free–
dom from prejudice and boredom, a sense of the concrete, tact, infor–
mation, the love of festival and celebration, and, above all, that mys–
terious source of the magical fascination that unifies his other
gifts,
Personality. "'Good Lord, what a personality!' he [Castorp]
felt for the hundredth time." Incoherent, "blurred," he soars with
decisive gesticulations above the "dialecticians" Settembrini and
Naphta, to his ecstasy of suicide, an "abdication," a perfectly-timed
act of the human will.
It would appear that at the time
The Magic Mountain
was writ–
ten Mann's intention was to put Peeperkom forward as a solution,
ontrasting the traditional-historical, half-real, half-legendary man–
f-the-world with the dwarfs created by contemporary Western atti–
des.
