MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON
0 N the occasion of his seventy-fifth birthday Dr. Thomas Mann delivered to the University of Chicago a lecture bearing the title "Meine Zeit." It has now been published in pamphlet form by the Fischer Verlag, and I have been reading it with the reverent curiosity invariablx aroused in me by the writings of this great literary artist. The recurrent theme in most of Thomas Mann's writings is the conflict between the individual and his environment, or more specifically between the subjective and the objective elements in human character. The artist, with his intense sensibility, with his addiction to wide and rapid associations, is peculiarly exposed to this conflict. He is so receptive, so con- stantly aware of how indefinite is the relation between thought and action, that he finds it impossible to interpret contemporary events in terms of simple positives and negatives, of black and white ; for him everything merges into everything else in a succession of grey zones. Unlike the man of action, he is unable to adopt towards contemporary problems an attitude of immediate certainty ; always there arises an argument in his brain ; and he is thus forced, if he is to acquire any objective consistency, to adopt as his directives those interior instincts and impulses as are constants in his own temperament. These directives, for Thomas Mann, have been " art " and "humanity." Yet these twin stars of guidance do not always permit the individual to navigate a direct course through the mists and reefs of a quickly changing and wholly uncharted world. As an artist he may be tempted to flinch from the crudity of mass emotions, to adopt towards contemporary politics an attitude of shocked repugnance, and in the end to retire from the turmoil in dignified disgust. As a humanitarian he may become so impatient with human stupidity, so distressed by the slow movement of pro- gress, creeping but a single inch year by year, that he will forget that politics are the art of the possible and rise in solitary impotence among the clouds of Utopia. It is unlikely that he will impress the men of action by the consistency of his ways. Since in modern politics the intellectual is always a lone, ineffectual and wandering fish.
If viewed externally, Thomas Mann's attitude towards con- temporary politics might, I suppose, be regarded as inconsistent. He started by being a nationalist, he then became a potent anti- nationalist, and he has ended by being an internationalist of a peculiar type. As an intellectual he has been contemptuous of the confused thinking of the average politician, striving always to dis- cover some logical pattern or system of order in the welter of human affairs. As a humanitarian and a humanist he has been horrified by the latent powers of self-destruction possessed by the human race and he has sought to find his directives in his own instinctive horror of cruelty and lies. These processes have not led him to any very logical conclusions, but as processes they are of great interest. In this lecture he does not seek to write any apology for his otvn fluctuations ; he merely tries to explain them. He describes how he was born and bred in the last decades of the bourgeois liberal world. He considers that it was a great privilege to have experienced the intellectual solidity of that now fading epoch, a privilege that provided him and his contemporaries with a "cultural advantage" over those who arrived only when those firm certainties had begun to disintegrate. He was unaware, he assures us, that in writing of the decay of the house of Buddenbrooks he was, in fact, describing the disintegration of the soul of Western civilisation : "Die Seele des Abendlandes." It is with his accustomed dignified melancholy that he bemoans the passing of the old bourgeois standards.
The Lubeck of Thomas Mann's youth represented a sound middle- class community, not unaffected by the "brutal ingenuity" of Bismarck. His masters at school would dismiss the Social Democrats as hooligans ; on the rare occasions when he played games he was
expected to do so in a stiff shirt with the cuffs turned down. He gloried in the fact that he was a citizen of the great Hansa tradition and despised those who adopted the foppish formula of the fin de siècle mode. His masters were the great nineteenth-century novelists of Russia and England ; he was not uninfluenced by Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Flaubert, but he reacted against the soft debilitating zephyrs of aestheticism and decadence and determined sturdily to express the universally Valid in good old German prose. It was this faith in the more solid German virtues, this hatred of the decadence that seemed to creep like some virus across the frontiers, that led him to publish at the end of the first war "Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen," a publication that has induced some of his critics to contend that he was a natural Junker at heart. Four years later he emerged as a supporter of the Weimar Republic and as a. redoubtable opponent of German nationalism. He accomplished this transition, so he tells us, "without being aware that I had com- mitted any breach of continuity, without the slightest feeling that I had anything to abjure." He saw in German nationalism something anti-humanistic, something " chthonian "; he recognised that this wild intoxication was creating a young German generation devoid of civilised values, " at one and the same time steeled and shattered." He became the potent champion and the illustrious victim of the liberal idea.
* He contends in this Chicago lecture that his opposition to the Totalitarian dogma was not inspired solely by his love for the old liberal tradition, but by his conviction that totalitarianism and truth are incompatible. "A lie," lift writes, "is insupportable, both morally and esthetically." How comes it, therefore, that Thomas Mann, in his last period, has displayed towards Russian Communism a degree of tolerance such as he never accorded to the Fascist or the Nazi system ? He admits that Communism, as a doctrine, is " alien " to him ; he is aware that the Russians are capable of what he calls "Sarmatian savagery "; he recognises that in Russia revolution and autocracy have been fused together and adopted " byzantine clothes ". Yet he contends that he owes so great a debt to Russian literature that he cannot bring himself to feel any animosity towards the Slav genius, and he evolves a most interesting theory to explain why his intellect and his humanity forbid him to regard with anything but disfavour the hysterical anti-Russian passions that have seized upon the American mind. He contends that, had more intelligence been manifest on both sides, something "great and good" might have emerged from the partnership in war between the Americans and the Russians. He advances the strange paradox that these two benevolent giants have much in common ; they share the same gay and primitive attitude towards life ; each of them is unencumbered by the sophistication of the European lands. Moreover, the whole theory of liberal democracy requires readjustment, since it contains a dichotomy between the two fundamental principles of " freedom " and "equality." Equality contains within itself the seed of tyranny and freedom the seed of dissolution. If only American democracy would ' become more socialistic and Russian socialism more democratic, then the conflict between them might lose its bitterness and time (that beneficent factor which is on the side of all of us) bring with it happiness and peace.
I agree with Thomas Mann that if the two benevolent giants were simultaneously to adopt an identical brand of social democracy, the danger of conflict would be lessened. But the fact remains that the Americans are unlikely to abandon their faith in free enterprise and the Russian autocracy unlikely to risk the peril of setting their peoples free. I cannot but feel that, in this instance, Thomas Mann has allowed his intellect and his humanity to tempt him to believe that what he wants to hapPen is likely to occur. But I prefer his hopes to the drab pessimism of those who only stand and wait.
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