“Now the parting hour has come
I must leave my lovèd home”
and turned under these circumstances to God, imploring Him to take under His special care and protection his beloved sister. He was going to the wars: the rhythm changed, grew brisk and lively, dull care and sorrow might go hang! He, the invisible singer, longed to be in the field, to stand in the thickest of the fray, where danger was hottest, and fling himself upon the foe—gallant, God-fearing, altogether French. But if, he sang, God should call him to Himself, then would He look down protectingly on “thee”—meaning the singer’s sister, as Hans Castorp was perfectly aware, yet the word thrilled him to the depths, and his emotion prolonged itself as the hero sang, to a mighty choral accompaniment:
“O Lord of heaven, hear my prayer!
Guard Marguerite within Thy shelt’ring care!”
There the record ceased. We have dwelt upon it because of Hans Castorp’s especial penchant; but also because it played a certain role on a later and most strange occasion. And now we come back to the fifth and last piece in his group of high favourites: this time not French, but something especially and exemplarily German; not opera either, but a lied, one of those which are folksong and masterpiece together, and from the combination receive their peculiar stamp as spiritual epitomes. Why should we beat about the bush? It was Schubert’s “Linden-Tree,” it was none other than the old, old favourite, “Am Brunnen vor dem Tore.”
It was sung to piano accompaniment by a tenor voice; and the singer was a lad of parts and discernment, who knew how to render with great skill, fine musical feeling and finesse in recitative his simple yet consummate theme. We all know that the noble lied sounds rather differently when given as a concert-number from its rendition in the childish or the popular mouth. In its simplified form the melody is sung straight through; whereas in the original art-song, the key changes to minor in the second of the eight-line stanzas, changes back again with beautiful effect to major in the fifth line; is dramatically resolved in the following “bitter blasts” and “facing the tempest”; and returns again only with the last four lines of the third stanza, which are repeated to finish out the melody. The truly compelling turn in the melody occurs three times, in its modulated second half, the third time in the repetition of the last half-strophe “Ay, onward, ever onward.” The enchanting turn, which we would not touch too nearly in bold words, comes on the phrases “Upon its branches fair,” “A message in my ear,” “Yet ever in my breast”; and each time the tenor rendered them, in his clear, warm voice, with his excellent breathing-technique, with the suggestion of a sob, amid so much sensitive, beauty-loving intelligence, the listener felt his heart gripped in undreamed-of fashion; with an effect the singer knew how to heighten by head-tones of extraordinary ardour on the lines “I found my solace there,” and “For rest and peace are here.” In the repetition of the last line, “Here shouldst thou find thy rest,” he sang the “shouldst thou” the first time yearningly, at full strength, but the second in the tenderest flute-tones.
So much for the song, and the rendering of it. For the earlier selections, we may flatter ourselves, perhaps, that we have been able to communicate to the reader some understanding, more or less precise, of Hans Castorp’s intimate emotional participation in the chosen numbers of his nightly programme. But to make clear what this last one, the old “Linden-Tree,” meant to him, is truly a ticklish endeavour; requiring great delicacy of emphasis if more harm than good is not to come of the undertaking.
Let us put it thus: a conception which is of the spirit, and therefore significant, is so because it reaches beyond itself to become the expression and exponent of a larger conception, a whole world of feeling and sentiment, which, whether more or less completely, is mirrored in the first, and in this wise, accordingly, the degree of its significance measured. Further, the love felt for such a creation is in itself “significant”: betraying something of the person who cherishes it, characterizing his relation to that broader world the conception bodies forth—which, consciously or unconsciously, he loves along with and in the thing itself.
May we take it that our simple hero, after so many years of hermetic-pedagogic discipline, of ascent from one stage of being to another, has now reached a point where he is conscious of the “meaningfulness” of his love and the object of it? We assert, we record, that he has. To him the song meant a whole world, a world which he must have loved, else he could not have so desperately loved that which it represented and symbolized to him. We know what we are saying when we add—perhaps rather darkly—that he might have had a different fate if his temperament had been less accessible to the charms of the sphere of feeling, the general attitude of mind, which the lied
