Hans Castorp did not care for this last drift in Herr Settembrini’s sonorous flow of words. He mistrusted it; it sounded too much like a personal or national animus. As for Joachim Ziemssen, whenever the Italian fell into this vein, he scowled and turned away his head, or sought to create a diversion by saying it was time for the rest-cure. Neither did Hans Castorp feel obliged to listen when the conversation took these devious paths; they clearly fell outside the limits within which his conscience prompted him to profit by Herr Settembrini’s words. Yet conscience still urged him to continue in the effort; so clearly that often, as opportunity arose, he would even invite the Italian to discourse on the subject of his ideas.
Those ideas, ideals, and efforts of the aspiring will were, Settembrini said, traditional in his family. He inherited them. Grandfather, son, and grandson, each in his turn, had dedicated to them their entire lives and all their spiritual energy. The father in his own way had done so no less than Grandfather Giuseppe. True, he had not been a political agitator or active combatant in the cause of freedom, but a quiet and sensitive scholar, a humanist sitting at his writing-desk. But what, after all, was humanism if not love of humankind, and by that token also political activity, rebellion against all that tended to defile or degrade our conception of humanity? He had been accused of exaggerating the importance of form. But he who cherished beauty of form did so because it enhanced human dignity; whereas the Middle Ages, in striking contrast, had been sunk not only in superstitious hostility to the human spirit, but also in a shameful formlessness. From the very beginning he had defended the right of the human being to his earthly interests, to liberty of thought and joy in life, and insisted that we could safely leave heaven to take care of itself. Humanism—had not Prometheus been the earliest humanist, and was he not identical with the Satan hymned by Carducci? Ah, if the cousins had only heard that arch-enemy of the Church, at Bologna, pouring the vials of his sarcasm upon the Christian sentimentalism of the Romanticismo! Upon Manzoni’s Inni Sacri! Upon the shadows-and-moonlight poetry of the romantic movement, which he had compared to “Luna, Heaven’s pallid nun”! Per Bacco, this was a joy to listen to! And they ought to have heard Carducci interpret Dante, celebrating him as the citizen of a great city-state, who had spoken out against asceticism and the negation of life, and on the side of the world-transforming and reforming deed! It was not the sickly and mystagogic figure of Beatrice which the poet had celebrated under the name of “donna gentil e pietosa”; rather it had been his wife, who represented in the poem the principle of worldly knowledge and practical workaday life.
Thus Hans Castorp came to hear something about Dante, and certainly from the lips of authority. He was not too much inclined to believe implicitly all Settembrini said; he considered him too much of a windbag for that. Still it was an interesting conception, this of Dante as the wide-awake citizen of a great metropolis. And now Settembrini went on to speak of himself, and to explain how the tendencies of his immediate forbears, the political from his grandfather, the humanistic from his father, had united in his own person to produce the writer and independent man of letters. For literature was after all nothing else than the combination of humanism and politics; a conjunction the more immediate in that humanism itself was politics and politics humanism. Hans Castorp did his best at this point to listen and comprehend, in the hope of finally learning wherein had consisted the crass ignorance of Magnus the brewer, and finding out what else literature actually was, above and beyond “beautiful characters.” Settembrini asked his audience whether they had ever heard of Brunetto, Brunetto Latini, a Florentine notary, who about the year 1250 had written a book on the subject of the virtues and the vices. He it was who had sharpened the wits of the Florentines, taught them the art of language, and how to guide their state according to the rules of politics.
“There you have it, gentlemen, there you have it!” Settembrini cried with ardour, and enlarged upon the cult of the “word,” the art of eloquence, which he called the triumph of the human genius. For the word was the glory of mankind, it alone imparted dignity to life. Not only was humanism bound up with the word, and with literature, but so also was humanity itself, man’s ancient dignity and manly self-respect (“You heard, didn’t you,” Hans Castorp said later to his cousin, “you heard him say that literature is a question of beautiful words? I spotted it directly”), from which it followed that politics too is bound up with the word. Or, rather, it followed directly from the union, the unity that subsisted between humanity and literature, for the beautiful word begets the beautiful deed.
“Two hundred years ago,” Settembrini said, “you had a poet in your country, a magnificent old chatterbox who set great store in good handwriting because he thought it must induce a good style. He should have gone a step further and said that a good style would lead to good deeds,” Settembrini added. For writing
