military and civil government, a plot in which he had been deeply involved, he had escaped by a hair’s breadth the clutches of Metternich’s hirelings, and spent the time of his exile fighting and bleeding, first in Spain for the cause of constitutionalism, then in Greece for the independence of the Hellenic peoples. It was in Greece that Settembrini’s father had seen the light—which probably accounted for his being a humanist and lover of classical antiquity. His mother had been of German stock; Settembrini had married her in Switzerland and taken her about with him in his further adventurous career. He had been allowed, after ten years of exile, to return to Milan, where he had practised his profession, without for a moment ceasing to labour, with voice and pen, in verse and prose, for the establishment of a united republic, and to draw up subversive programmes characterized by dictatorial ardour, in which were promulgated in the clearest style the unification of the liberated people and the attainment of general felicity. One detail mentioned by the grandson made a profound impression upon Hans Castorp: Grandfather Giuseppe, to the day of his death, wore black—in token, he said, of his mourning for the state of the fatherland, languishing in misery and servitude. Hans Castorp, at this piece of information, thought of his own grandfather, as he had once or twice before during Settembrini’s narrative. He too, for as long as his grandson had known him, wore black clothes. But for how different a reason! Hans Lorenz Castorp had worn the quaint old fashion to indicate his oneness with a bygone time and his essential lack of sympathy with the present; worn it up to the end of his days, when he had returned in death to his true and adequate presentment—with the starched ruff. Certainly these were two strikingly different kinds of grandfather! Hans Castorp pondered, his eyes fixed in a stare, cautiously shaking his head in a way that might as well be taken for a sign of admiration for Giuseppe Settembrini as for the opposite. He honourably refrained from judging what he did not understand, but simply made mental note of the contrast and let it go at that. He could see the narrow head of old Hans Lorenz, as it bent musing over the pale gold rim of the christening basin, that symbol of the passing and the abiding, of continuity through change. He had his mouth open; Hans Castorp knew the words “great-great-great” were about to issue from it, the sombre syllables which always reminded him of places where one walked with bent head and reverent gait. And then he saw Giuseppe Settembrini, with the tricolour on his arm, waving his sabre and breathing a vow to Heaven with dark gaze flung aloft, as he stormed the heights of despotism at the head of a liberty-loving host. Well, he thought, each of them had his fine and splendid side—he made the greater effort to be fair, because he knew himself to be partisan, on personal or partly personal grounds. For Grandfather Settembrini had fought to obtain political rights; whereas the other grandfather—or his ancestors—had originally had all the rights, and the scoundrels had taken them away from him, in the course of the centuries, by violence or pettifoggery. So both grandfathers had worn mourning, the one in the north and the one in the south, and both in the same idea; namely, to put a great gulf between them and the evil present. But whereas the one had assumed it in token of his pious reverence for the past and the dead, to whom he felt himself with his whole being to belong, the other had worn it as a sign of rebellion, in the name of progress, and in a spirit of hostility toward the past. Yes, these were two different worlds. As Herr Settembrini talked, and Hans Castorp stood, as it were, between them and cast his critical eye upon one and upon the other, they called back to his conscious mind a scene from his own past life. He saw himself rowing on a lake in Holstein, one late summer evening; the sun was down, the almost full moon rising above the bushes that bordered the lake. He rowed alone and slowly over the quiet waters, gazing to right and left at a scene fantastic as any dream. In the west it was still broad day, with a fixed and glassy air; but in the east he looked into a moonlit landscape, wreathed in the magic of rising mists and equally convincing to his bewildered sense. The strange combination lasted some brief quarter-hour before the balance finally settled in favour of night and the moon; all that time Hans Castorp’s dazzled eyes went shifting in lively amazement from one scene to the other: from day to night and back again to day. The picture returned to him now.
At the same time the thought crossed his mind that Lawyer Settembrini could scarcely have been much of a jurist, considering his other occupations and the extended sphere of his activities. His grandson asseverated, however, and Hans Castorp found it credible, that the grandfather had been from early childhood down to the last day of his life inspired by the fundamental principle of justice. Our hero, all heavy-headed as he was and organically preoccupied by the six-course Berghof meal he had just eaten, made an effort to understand what Settembrini meant when he called this principle “the source and fount of liberty and progress.” Progress, up to now, had had to do, in Hans Castorp’s mind, with such things as the nineteenth-century development of cranes and lifting-tackle. He was accordingly gratified to learn that Grandfather Settembrini had not underestimated the importance of such matters. Of course, his own grandfather hadn’t either. The Italian paid a tribute to the native land of his two listeners, for the inventions of gunpowder—whereby the armour of feudalism had been thrown on
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