“What you are pleased to call the bourgeois acceptation of life,” retorted Settembrini, speaking rather tightlipped, with the corners of his mouth drawn back beneath the waving moustache, while his neck screwed up and around out of his collar with fantastic effect, “will always be ready to enter the lists on any terms you like, for reason and morality, and for their legitimate influence upon young and wavering minds.”
A silence followed. The young people stared ahead of them, embarrassed. After a few paces, Settembrini said—having brought his head and neck to a natural posture once more: “You must not be surprised to hear this gentleman and me indulging in long disputations. We do it in all friendliness, and on a basis of considerable mutual understanding.”
That had a good effect—it was human and gallant of Herr Settembrini. But then Joachim, meaning well in his turn, and thinking to carry forward the conversation within harmless channels, was fated to say: “We happened to be talking about war, my cousin and I, as we came up behind you.”
“I heard you,” Naphta answered. “I caught your words and turned round. Were you talking politics, discussing the world situation?”
“Oh, no,” laughed Hans Castorp. “How should we come to be doing that? For my cousin here, it would be unprofessional to discuss politics; and as for me, I willingly forgo the privilege. I don’t know anything about it—I haven’t had a newspaper in my hand since I came.”
Settembrini, as once before, found this reprehensible. He proceeded to show himself immensely well informed upon current events, and gave his approval to the state of world affairs, in so far as they were running a course favourable to the progress of civilization. The European atmosphere was full of pacific thought and plans for disarmament. The democratic idea was on the march. He said he had it on reliable authority that the “Young Turks” were about to abandon their revolutionary undertakings. Turkey as a national, constitutional state—what a triumph for humanity!
“Liberalization of Islam,” Naphta scoffed. “Capital! enlightened fanaticism—oh, very good indeed! And of interest to you too,” he said, turning to Joachim. “Because when Abdul Hamid falls, then there will be an end of your influence in Turkey, and England will set herself up as protector.—You must always give full weight to the information you get from our friend Settembrini,” he said to both cousins—and this too sounded almost insolent: as though he thought they would be inclined to take Settembrini lightly. “On national-revolutionary matters he is very well informed. In his country they cultivate good relations with the English Balkan Committee. But what is to become of the Reval agreement, Ludovico, if your progressive Turks are successful? Edward VII will no longer be able to give the Russians free access to the Dardanelles; and if Austria pulls herself together to pursue an active policy in the Balkans, why—”
“Oh, you, with your Cassandra prophecies!” Settembrini parried. “Nicholas is a lover of peace. We owe him the Hague conferences, which will always be moral events of the first order.”
“Yes, Russia must give herself time to recover from her little mishap in the East.”
“Fie, sir! Why should you scoff at human nature’s yearning for social amelioration? A people that thwarts such aspirations exposes itself to moral obloquy.”
“But what is politics for, then, if not to give both sides a chance to compromise themselves in turn?”
“Are you espousing the cause of Pan-Germanism?”
Naphta shrugged his shoulders, which were not quite even—in fact, to add to his ugliness, he was probably a little warped. He disdained to reply, and Settembrini pronounced judgment: “At all events, what you say is cynical. You see nothing but political trickery in the lofty exertions of democracy to fulfil itself internationally—”
“Where you would like me to see idealism or even religiosity. What I do see is the last feeble stirrings of the instinct of self-preservation, the last remnant at the command of a condemned world-system. The catastrophe will and must come—it advances on every hand and in every way. Take the British policy. England’s need to secure the Indian glacis is legitimate. But what will be the consequences of it? Edward knows as well as you and I that Russia has to make good her losses in Manchuria, and that internal peace is as necessary to her as daily bread. Yet—he probably can’t help himself—he forces her to look westward for expansion, stirs up slumbering rivalries between St. Petersburg and Vienna—”
“Oh, Vienna! Your interest in that ancient obstruction is due, I presume, to the fact that her decaying empire is a sort of mummy, as it were, of the Holy Roman Empire of the German people.”
“While you, I suppose, are Russophil out of humanistic affinity with Caesaro-papism.”
“Democracy, my friend, has more to hope from the Kremlin than she has from the Hofburg; and it is disgraceful for the country of Luther and Gutenberg—”
“It is probably not only disgraceful, but stupid into the bargain. But even this stupidity is an instrument of fate—”
“Oh, spare me your talk about fate! Human reason needs only to will more strongly than fate, and she is fate!”
“One always wills one’s fate. Capitalistic Europe is willing hers.”
“One believes in the coming of war if one does not sufficiently abhor it.”
“Your abhorrence of war is logically disjointed if you do not make the State itself your point of departure.”
“The national state is the temporal principle, which you would like to ascribe to the evil one. But when nations are free and equal, when the small and weak are safeguarded from aggression, when there is justice in the world, and national boundaries—”
“Yes, I know, the Brenner frontier. The liquidation of Austria. If I only knew how you expect to bring that about without war!”
“And
