The old man spoke with friendly reassurance: “I merely wanted to help both of us move forward a step. There is no need for you to aver the purity of your motives. If I have anticipated you and helped speed the coming of something that also seems desirable to you, all is well.”
After Knecht had told him the nature of his assignment, he commented: “Your superiors in Castalia are not exactly brilliant diplomats, but they are not so bad either, and they know a good thing when they see it. I shall give all the consideration to your mission, and my decision will depend partly on how well you can explain your Castalian constitution and ideals, and make them seem plausible to me. Let us give ourselves all the time we need for that.” Seeing that Knecht still looked somewhat crestfallen, he gave a brittle laugh and said: “If you like, you can also regard my proceeding thus as a kind of lesson. We are two diplomats, and diplomats’ intercourse is always a combat, no matter how friendly a form it may take. In our struggle, as it happens, I was momentarily at a disadvantage; I had lost the initiative. You knew more than I. Now the balance has been restored. The chess move was successful; therefore it was the right one.”
Knecht thought it important to win Father Jacobus’s approval for the Castalian authorities’ project; but it seemed to him far more important to learn as much as possible from him, and for his own part to serve this learned and powerful man as a reliable guide to the Castalian world. A good many of Knecht’s friends and later disciples envied him as remarkable men are always envied, not only for their greatness of soul and energy, but also for their seeming luck, their seeming preferment by destiny. The lesser man sees in the greater as much as he can see, and Joseph Knecht’s career cannot help striking every observer as unusually brilliant, rapid, and seemingly effortless. Certainly we are tempted to say of that period in his life: he was lucky. Nor would we wish to try to explain this “luck” rationalistically or moralistically, either as the causal result of external circumstances or as a kind of reward for special virtue. Luck has nothing to do with rationality or morality; by its nature it has about it a quality akin to magic, belonging to a primitive, more youthful stage of mankind’s history. The lucky innocent, showered with gifts by the fairies, pampered by the gods, is not the object of rational study, and hence not a fit subject for biographical analysis; he is a symbol who always stands outside the personal and the historical realms. Nevertheless, there are outstanding men with whose lives “luck” is intimately bound up, even though that luck may consist merely in the fact that they and the task proper to their talents actually intersect on the plane of history and biography, that they are born neither too soon nor too late. Knecht seems to have been one of these. Thus his life, at least for a considerable part of his way, gives the impression that everything desirable simply fell into his lap. We do not wish to deny or to gloss over this aspect of his life. Moreover, we could explain it rationally only by a biographical method which is not ours, neither desired nor permitted in Castalia; that is, we would have to enter into an almost unlimited discussion of the most personal, most private matters, of health and sickness, the oscillations and curves in his vitality and self-confidence. We are quite sure that any such biographical approach — which is out of the question for us — would reveal a perfect balance between Knecht’s “luck” and his suffering, but nevertheless would falsify our portrayal of his person and his life.
But enough digression. We were saying that many of those who knew Knecht, or had only heard of him, envied him. Probably few things in his life seemed to lesser folk so enviable as his relationship to the old Benedictine Father, for he was at one and the same time pupil and teacher, taker and giver, conquered and conqueror, friend and collaborator. Moreover, none of Knecht’s conquests since his successful courting of Elder Brother in the Bamboo Grove had given him such happiness. No other had made him feel so intensely honored and abashed, rewarded and stimulated. Of his later favorite pupils, almost all have testified to how frequently, gladly, and joyfully he would refer to Father Jacobus. Knecht learned from the Benedictine something he could scarcely have learned in the Castalia of those days. He acquired an overview of the methods of historical knowledge and the tools of historical research, and had his first practice in applying them. But far beyond that, he experienced history not as an intellectual discipline, but as reality, as life; and in keeping with that, the transformation and elevation of his own personal life into history. This was something he could not have learned from a mere scholar. Father Jacobus was not only far more than a scholar, a seer, and a sage; he was also a mover and shaper. He had used the position in which fate had placed him not just to warm himself at the cozy fires of a contemplative existence; he had allowed the winds of the world to blow through his scholar’s den and admitted the perils and forebodings of the age into his heart. He had taken action, had shared the blame and the responsibility for the events of his time; he had not contented himself with surveying, arranging, and interpreting the happenings of the distant past And he had not dealt only with ideas, but with the refractoriness of matter and the obstinacy of men. Together with his associate and antagonist, a recently deceased Jesuit, he was regarded as the real architect of the diplomatic and moral power and the impressive political prestige that the Roman Church had regained after ages of meekly borne ineffectuality and insignificance.
Although teacher and pupil scarcely ever discussed current politics (the Benedictine’s practice in holding his counsel as well as the younger man’s reluctance to be drawn into such issues combined to prevent that), Father Jacobus’s political position and activities so permeated his mind that all his opinions, all of his glances into the thicket of the world’s squabbles were those of the practical statesman. Not that he was an ambitious or an intriguing politician. He was no regent and leader, no climber either, but a councilor and arbitrator, a man whose conduct was tempered by sagacity, whose efforts were restrained by a profound insight into the inadequacies and difficulties of human nature, but whose fame, experience, knowledge of men and conditions, as well as his personal integrity and altruism, had enabled him to gain significant power.
Knecht had known nothing of all this when he came to Mariafels. He had even been ignorant of Father Jacobus’s name. The majority of the inhabitants of Castalia lived in a state of political innocence and naïveté such as had been quite common among the professors of earlier ages; they had no political rights and duties, scarcely ever saw a newspaper. Such was the habit of the average Castalian, such his attitude. Repugnance for current events, politics, newspapers, was even greater among the Glass Bead Game players who liked to think of themselves as the real elite, the cream of the Province, and went to some lengths not to let anything cloud the rarefied atmosphere of their scholarly and artistic existences. As we have seen, at the time of his first appearance at the monastery, Knecht had come not as a diplomatic envoy but solely as a teacher of the Glass Bead Game, and had no political knowledge aside from what Monsieur Dubois had managed to instil in a few weeks. He was by comparison much more knowing now, but he had by no means surrendered the Waldzeller’s distaste for engaging in current politics. Although his association with Father Jacobus had awakened hini politically and taught him a good deal, this had not happened because Knecht was drawn to this realm. It just happened, as an inevitable though incidental consequence.