“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 so-and-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 humanae 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 encyclopaedia 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
