Part 43 (1/2)
And enjoy, all else excelling,
Sweet liberty!”
”Yes, yes,” he said, as before; and pa.s.sed on to a fourth record, something very dear and good.
It is not our fault that it was French again, nor are we responsible for its once more striking the military note. It was an intermezzo, a solo number, the Prayer from Gounod's Faust Faust. The singer, a character warmly sympathetic to our young man's heart, was called in the opera Valentine; but Hans Castorp named him by another and dearly familiar, sadness-evoking name; whose onetime bearer he had come largely to identify with the operatic character whom the wonder-box was making vocal-though the latter to be sure had a much more beautiful voice, a warm and powerful baritone. His song was in three parts: the first consisting of two closely related ”corner”- strophes, religious in character, almost in the style of the Protestant chorale, and a middle-strophe, bold and chevaleresque chevaleresque, war-like, light-hearted, yet G.o.d-fearing too, and essentially French and military. The invisible character sang:
”Now the parting hour has come I must leave my loved home”
and turned under these circ.u.mstances to G.o.d, 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, G.o.d-fearing, altogether French. But if, he sang, G.o.d 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 lied, one of those which are folk-song 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 n.o.ble lied 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 repet.i.tion 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, arid so much sensitive, beauty-loving intelligence, the listener felt his heart gripped in undreamed-of fas.h.i.+on; 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 repet.i.tion 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. 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 repet.i.tion 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, arid so much sensitive, beauty-loving intelligence, the listener felt his heart gripped in undreamed-of fas.h.i.+on; 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 repet.i.tion 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 partic.i.p.ation 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 a.s.sert, 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 att.i.tude of mind, which the lied lied so profoundly, so mystically epitomized. The truth was that his very destiny had been marked by stages, adventures, insights, and these flung up in his mind suitable themes for his ”stock-taking” activities, and these, in their turn, ripened him into an intuitional critic of this sphere, of this its absolutely exquisite image, and his love of it. To the point even that he was quite capable of bringing up all three as objects of his conscientious scruples! so profoundly, so mystically epitomized. The truth was that his very destiny had been marked by stages, adventures, insights, and these flung up in his mind suitable themes for his ”stock-taking” activities, and these, in their turn, ripened him into an intuitional critic of this sphere, of this its absolutely exquisite image, and his love of it. To the point even that he was quite capable of bringing up all three as objects of his conscientious scruples!
Only one totally ignorant of the tender pa.s.sion will suppose that such scruples can detract from the object of love. On the contrary, they but give it spice. It is they which lend love the spur of pa.s.sion, so that one might almost define pa.s.sion as misgiving love. But wherein lay Hans Castorp's conscientious and stocktaking misgiving, as to the ultimate propriety of his love for the enchanting lied lied and the world whose image it was? What was the world behind the song, which the motions of his conscience made to seem a world of forbidden love? It was death. and the world whose image it was? What was the world behind the song, which the motions of his conscience made to seem a world of forbidden love? It was death.
What utter and explicit madness! That glorious song! An indisputable masterpiece, sprung from the profoundest and holiest depths of racial feeling; a precious possession, the archetype of the genuine; embodied loveliness. What vile detraction! Yes. Ah, yes! All very fine. Thus must every upright man speak. But for all that, behind this so lovely and pleasant artistic production stood-death. It had with death certain relations, which one might love, yet not without consciously, and in a ”stocktaking” sense, acknowledging a certain illicit element in one's love. Perhaps in its original form it was not sympathy with death; perhaps it was something very much of the people and racy of life; but spiritual sympathy with it was none the less sympathy with death. At first blush proper and pious enough, indisputably. But the issues of it were sinister.
What was all this he was thinking? He would not have listened to it from one of you. Sinister issues. Fantastical, dark-corner, misanthropic, torture-chamber thoughts, Spanish black and the ruff, l.u.s.t not love-and these the issues of pure-eyed loveliness!
Unquestioning confidence, Hans Castorp knew, he had never placed in Herr Settembrini. But he remembered now an admonition the enlightened mentor had given him in past time, at the beginning of his hermetic career, on the subject of ”spiritual backsliding” to darker ages. Perhaps it would be well to make cautious application of that wisdom to the present case. It was the backsliding which Herr Settembrini had characterized as ”disease”; the epitome itself, the spiritual phase to which one backslid-that too would appeal to his pedagogic mind as ”diseased”? And even so? Hans Castorp's loved nostalgic lay, and the sphere of feeling to which it belonged-morbid? Nothing of the sort. They were the sanest, the homeliest in the world. And yet-This was a fruit, sound and splendid enough for the instant or so, yet extraordinarily p.r.o.ne to decay; the purest refreshment of the spirit, if enjoyed at the right moment, but the next, capable of spreading decay and corruption among men. It was the fruit of life, conceived of death, pregnant of dissolution; it was a miracle of the soul, perhaps the highest, in the eye and sealed with the blessing of conscienceless beauty; but on cogent grounds regarded with mistrust by the eye of shrewd geniality dutifully ”taking stock” in its love of the organic; it was a subject for self-conquest at the definite behest of conscience.
Yes, self-conquest-that might well be the essence of triumph over this love, this soul-enchantment that bore such sinister fruit! Hans Castorp's thoughts, or rather his prophetic half-thoughts soared high, as he sat there in night and silence before his truncated sarcophagus of music. They soared higher than his understanding, they were alchemistically enhanced. Ah, what power had this soul-enchantment! We were all its sons, and could achieve mighty things on earth, in so far as we served it. One need have no more genius, only much more talent, than the author of the ”Lindenbaum,” to be such an artist of soul-enchantment as should give to the song a giant volume by which it should subjugate the world. Kingdoms might be founded upon it, earthly, alltoo-earthly kingdoms, solid, ”progressive,” not at all nostalgic-in which the song degenerated to a piece of gramophone music played by electricity. But its faithful son might still be he who consumed his life in self-conquest, and died, on his lips the new word of love which as yet he knew not how to speak. Ah, it was worth dying for, the enchanted lied! lied! But he who died for it, died indeed no longer for it; was a hero only because he died for the new, the new word of love and the future that whispered in his heart. These, then, were Hans Castorp's favourite records. But he who died for it, died indeed no longer for it; was a hero only because he died for the new, the new word of love and the future that whispered in his heart. These, then, were Hans Castorp's favourite records.
Highly Questionable
EDHIN KROKOWSKI'S lectures had in the swift pa.s.sage of the years taken an unexpected turn. His researches, which dealt with psycho-a.n.a.lysis and the dream-life of humanity, had always had a subterranean, not to say catacombish character; but now, by a transition so gradual that one scarcely marked it, they had pa.s.sed over to the frankly supernatural, and his fortnightly lectures in the dining-room-the prime attraction of the house, the pride of the prospectus, delivered in a drawling, foreign voice, in frock-coat and sandals from behind a little covered table, to the rapt and motionless Berghof audience-these lectures no longer treated of the disguised activities of love and the retransformation of the illness into the conscious emotion. They had gone on to the extraordinary phenomena of hypnotism and somnambulism, telepathy, ”dreaming true,” and second sight; the marvels of hysteria, the expounding of which widened the philosophic horizon to such an extent that suddenly before the listener's eyes would glitter darkly puzzles like that of the relation of matter to the psychical, yes, even the puzzle of life itself, which, it appeared, was easier to approach by uncanny, even morbid paths than by the way of health.
We say this because we consider it our duty to confound those flippant spirits who declared that Dr. Krokowski had resorted to mystification for the sake of redeeming his lectures from hopeless monotony; in other words, with purely emotional ends in view. Thus spoke the slanderous tongues which are everywhere to be found. True, the gentlemen at the Monday lectures flicked their ears harder than ever to make them hear; Fraulein Levi looked, if possible, even more like a wax figure wound up by machinery. But these effects were as legitimate as the train of thought pursued by the mind of the learned gentleman, and for that he might claim that it was not only consistent but even inevitable. The field of his study had always been those wide, dark tracts of the human soul, which one had been used to call the subconsciousness, though they might perhaps better be called the superconsciousness, since from them sometimes emanates a knowingness beyond anything of which the conscious intelligence is capable, and giving rise to the hypothesis that there may subsist connexions and a.s.sociations between the lowest and least illumined regions of the individual soul and a wholly knowing All-soul. The province of the subsconscious, ”occult” in the proper sense of the word, very soon shows itself to be occult in the narrower sense as well, and forms one of the sources whence flow the phenomena we have agreed thus to characterize. But that is not all. Whoever recognizes a symptom of organic disease as an effect of the conscious soul-life of forbidden and hystericized emotions, recognizes the creative force of the psychical within the material-a force which one is inclined to claim as a second source of magic phenomena. Idealist of the pathological, not to say pathological idealist, he sees himself at the point of departure of certain trains of thought which will shortly issue in the problem of existence, that is to say in the problem of the relation between spirit and matter. The materialist, son of a philosophy of sheer animal vigour, can never be dissuaded from explaining spirit as a mere phosph.o.r.escent product of matter; whereas the idealist, proceeding from the principle of creative hysteria, is inclined, and very readily resolved, to answer the question of primacy in the exactly opposite sense. Take it all in all, there is here nothing less than the old strife over which was first, the chicken or the egg-a strife which a.s.sumes its extraordinary complexity from the fact that no egg is thinkable except one laid by a hen, and no hen that has not crept out of a previously postulated egg.
Well then, it was such matters as these that Dr. Krokowski discussed in his lectures. He came upon them organically, logically, legitimately-that fact cannot be overemphasized. We will even add that he had already begun to treat of them before the arrival of Ellen Brand upon the scene of action, and the progress of matters into the empirical and experimental stage.
Who was Ellen Brand? We had almost forgotten that our readers do not know her, so familiar to us is the name. Who was she? Hardly anybody, at first glance. A sweet young thing of nineteen years, a flaxen-haired Dane, not from Copenhagen but from Odense-on-Funen, where her father had a b.u.t.ter business. She herself had been in commercial life for a couple of years or so; with a sleeve-protector on her writing-arm she had sat over heavy books, perched on a revolving stool in a provincial branch of a city bank-and developed temperature. It was a trifling case, probably more suspected than real, though Elly was indeed fragile, fragile and obviously chlorotic-distinctly sympathetic too, giving one a yearning to lay one's hand upon the flaxen head-as the Hofrat regularly did, when he spoke to her in the dining-room. A northern freshness emanated from her, a chaste and gla.s.sy, maidenly chaste atmosphere surrounded her, she was entirely lovable, with a pure, open look from childlike blue eyes, and a pointed, fine, High-German speech, slightly broken, with small typical misp.r.o.nunciations. About her features there was nothing unusual. Her chin was too short. She sat at table with the Kleefeld, who mothered her.
Now this little Fraulein Brand, this little Elly, this friendly-natured little Danish bicycle-rider and stoop-shouldered young counter-jumper, had things about her, of which no one could have dreamed, at first sight of her transparent small personality, but which began to discover themselves after a few weeks; and these it became Dr. Krokowski's affair to lay bare in all their extraordinariness.
The learned man received his first hint in the course of a general evening conversation. Various guessing games were being played; hidden objects found by the aid of strains from the piano, which swelled higher when one approached the right spot, and died away when the seeker strayed on a false scent. Then one person went outside and waited while it was decided what task he should perform; as, exchanging the rings of two selected persons; inviting someone to dance by making three bows before her; taking a designated book from the shelves and presenting it to this or that person-and more of the same kind. It is worthy of remark that such games had not been the practice among the Berghof guests. Who had introduced them was not afterwards easy to decide; certainly it had not been Elly Brand, yet they had begun since her arrival.