“These are temperamental differences, Herr Settembrini. We have different views as to what is knightly and warm-blooded. You, a southerner, would prescribe poison and dagger, at least you would conceive the affair in its social and passionate aspect, and want me to act like a gamecock. That would of course be masculine and gallant, in a social sense. But with me it is different. I am not at all masculine in the sense that I see in another man only a rival male and nothing more. Perhaps I am not masculine at all—certainly I am not in the sense which I tend to call ‘social,’ I don’t exactly know why. What I do is to question my sad heart whether I have any ground of complaint against the man. Has he really insulted me? But an insult must be of intent, otherwise it can be none. And as for his having ‘done anything’ to me, there I should have to apply to her— and I have no right to, certainly not with regard to Peeperkorn. For he is a quite extraordinary personality, which by itself is something for women, and then he is hardly a civilian, like me, he is a sort of military, a bit like my poor cousin, in that he has a point d’honneur, a sore spot, as it were, which is feeling, life.—I know I am talking nonsense, but I’d rather go rambling on, and partly expressing something I find it difficult to express, than to keep on transmitting faultless platitudes. That must be a military trait in my character, after all, if I may say so—”
“You may say so,” Settembrini acquiesced. “A trait at least worthy of praise. The courage to recognize and express—that is the quality that makes literature—that is humanism.”
Thus they parted on good terms, Herr Settembrini having given the conversation this placable turn. It was the wiser course; his position had not been so strong he could afford to push the argument to extremes. A conversation dealing with jealousy was rather slippery ground for him; at one point he would have been obliged to admit that his own position—as a pedagogue—was scarcely masculine in the social and cockfighting sense, else why should the prepotent Peeperkorn disturb his tranquillity, in the same way Naphta and Frau Chauchat did? Lastly, the Italian could not hope to argue his pupil out of interest in a personality to whose native superiority he himself and his partner in cerebral gymnastic were willy-nilly constrained to bow.
They were on safer ground when they could sustain the conversation in the realms of the intellectual, and hold the attention of their audience by one of their elegant and impassioned debates, academic, yet conducted as though the matter discussed were the most burning question of the time, or of all time. They were of course almost the sole support of such discussions; while these lasted; they did, to some extent, neutralize the effect of “bigness” purveyed by a certain member of their group, who could only accompany them by a running play of wrinkles, gestures, and snatches of mockery. But even that was enough to cast a shadow, rob their brilliant performance of some of its gloss, emasculate it, as it were, set up a crosscurrent perceptible to them all, though Peeperkorn himself remained unconscious, or conscious to a degree impossible for them to guess. Neither side could get any advantage, both were embarrassed, and the stamp of futility set upon their debate. We might put it like this: that their life-and-death duel of wits came to be carried on always with vague subterranean reference to “bigness” walking beside them, and to be deflected from its orbit by the magnetism “bigness” exerted. One cannot characterize otherwise this puzzling, for the two disputants maddening, posture of affairs. One can only add that had there been no Pieter Peeperkorn, party feeling would have run higher on both sides; as when Leo Naphta defended the arch-revolutionary nature of the Church, against Settembrini’s dogmatic assertion that that great historic power was to be looked upon merely as the protectress of the sinister forces of reaction; whereas all the forces that made for life and future, and looked undismayed on change and resolution, he claimed for the principles of enlightenment; science and progress, which had their rise in an epoch of quite opposed tendencies, the famous century that witnessed the rebirth of classical culture. He drove home his convictions with a graceful play of word and gesture. Whereupon Naphta, with chilling acuity, undertook to show—and showed too, with devastating clarity—that the Church, as the embodiment of the religious and ascetic ideal, was remote indeed from posing as the champion and support of the existing order, in other words of secular culture and civil law—rather had she from the beginning inscribed upon her radical banner the programme of their extirpation root and branch; that absolutely everything beloved and cherished of the bourgeoisie, the conservative, the cowardly, and the impotent—the State, family life, secular art and science—was consciously or unconsciously hostile to the religious idea, to the Church, whose innate tendency and permanent aim was the dissolution of all existing worldly orders, and the reconstitution of society after the model of the ideal, the communistic City of God.
After that, Settembrini took the floor—and well he knew how to avail himself of it. It was lamentable, he said—this confusion of luridly revolutionary doctrine with a general insurrection of all the powers of evil. The Church’s love of innovation had for centuries manifested itself in putting to the question the living idea, wherever she found it; throttling it, quenching it in smoke at the stake; today she announces through her emissaries that she rejoices in revolution, that her goal is the uprooting of freedom, culture, and democracy, which she intends to replace by barbarism and the dictatorship of the mob. Yea, verily, a fearsome mixture of contradictory consistency and consistent contradiction …
His opponent, Naphta retorted,
