“Backsliding,” continued Settembrini, as he lifted his umbrella away above the head of a passerby, “spiritual backsliding in the direction of that dark and tortured age, that, believe me, Engineer, is disease—a disease already sufficiently studied, to which various names have been given: one from the terminology of aesthetics and psychology, another from the domain of politics—all of them academic terms which are not to the point, and which I will spare you. But as in the spiritual life everything is interrelated, one thing growing out of another, and since one may not reach out one’s little finger to the Devil, lest he take the whole hand, and therewith the whole man; since, on the other side, a sound principle can produce only sound results, no matter which end one begins at—so disease, far from being something too refined, too worthy of reverence, to be associated with dullness, is, in itself, a degradation of mankind, a degradation painful and offensive to conceive. It may, in the individual case, be treated with consideration; but to pay it homage is—mark my words—an aberration, and the beginning of intellectual confusion. This woman you have mentioned to me—you will pardon me if I do not trouble to recall her name—ah, thank you, Frau Stöhr—it is not, it seems to me, the case of this ridiculous woman which places the human feelings in the dilemma to which you refer. She is ill, and she is limited; her case is hopeless, and the matter is simple. There is nothing left but to pity and shrug one’s shoulders. The dilemma, my dear sir, the tragedy, begins where nature has been cruel enough to split the personality, to shatter its harmony by imprisoning a noble and ardent spirit within a body not fit for the stresses of life. Have you heard of Leopardi, Engineer, or you, Lieutenant? An unhappy poet of my own land, a crippled, ailing man, born with a great soul, which his sufferings were constantly humiliating and dragging down into the depths of irony—its lamentations rend the heart to hear.”
And Settembrini began to recite in Italian, letting the beautiful syllables melt upon his tongue, as he closed his eyes and swayed his head from side to side, heedless that his hearers understood not a syllable. Obviously it was all done for the sake of impressing his companions with his memory and his pronunciation.
“But you don’t understand; you hear the words, yet without grasping their tragic import. My dear sirs, can you comprehend what it means when I tell you that it was the love of woman which the crippled Leopardi was condemned to renounce; that this it principally was which rendered him incapable of avoiding the embitterment of his soul? Fame and virtue were shadows to him, nature an evil power—and so she is, stupid and evil both, I agree with him there—he even despaired, horrible to say, he even despaired of science and progress! Here, Engineer, is the true tragedy. Here you have your ‘dilemma for the human feelings,’ here, and not in the case of that wretched woman, with whose name I really cannot burden my memory. Do not, for heaven’s sake, speak to me of the ennobling effects of physical suffering! A soul without a body is as inhuman and horrible as a body without a soul—though the latter is the rule and the former the exception. It is the body, as a rule, which flourishes exceedingly, which draws everything to itself, which usurps the predominant place and lives repulsively emancipated from the soul. A human being who is first of all an invalid is all body; therein lies his inhumanity and his debasement. In most cases he is little better than a carcass—”
“Funny,” Joachim said, bending forward to look at his cousin, on Herr Settembrini’s farther side. “You were saying something quite like that just lately.”
“Was I?” said Hans Castorp. “Yes, it may be something of the kind went through my head.”
Settembrini was silent a few paces. Then he said: “So much the better. So much the better if that is true. I am far from claiming to expound an original philosophy—such is not my office. If our engineer here has been making observations in harmony with my own, that only confirms my surmise that he is an intellectual amateur and up to the present, as is the wont of gifted youth, still experimenting with various points of view. The young man with parts is no unwritten page, he is rather one upon which all the writing has already been done, in sympathetic ink, the good and the bad together; it is the schoolmaster’s task to bring out the good, to obliterate forever the bad, by the methods of his profession.—You have been making purchases?” he asked, in a lighter tone.
“No,” Hans Castorp said. “That is, nothing but—”
“We ordered a pair of blankets for my cousin,” Joachim answered unconcernedly.
“For the afternoon cure—it’s got so beastly cold; and I am supposed to do as the Romans do, up here,” Hans Castorp said, laughing and looking at the ground.
“Ah ha! Blankets—the cure,” Settembrini said. “Yes, yes. In fact: placet experiri,” he repeated, with his Italian pronunciation, and took his leave, for their conversation had brought them to the door of the sanatorium, where they greeted the lame concierge in his lodge. Settembrini turned off into one of the sitting-rooms, to read the newspapers before luncheon. He evidently meant to cut the second rest period.
“Bless us and keep us!” Hans Castorp said to Joachim, as they stood in the lift. “What a pedagogue it is! He said himself that he had the ‘pedagogic
