THREE ESSAYS By Thomas Mann
This book, Three Essays (Seeker, 7s. 6d.), contains three studies one a conmarison of the genius of Tolstoy and Goethe, the second a study of the character of Frederick the Great Written in 1914 and concluding on an oddly jingo note concerning the destiny of Prussia ; and the third is an account of an experience in- the occult. Translation has, if anything, leadened the style and if one cannot say of Thomas Mann what he says of Tolstoy, that what he thought "_-was usually smaller than what he was," we feel that the essayist has an awkwardness uncommon in the novelist of The Magic Mountain." The essay on Tolstoy and Goethe is closely packed. Building from their common basis as aristocrats, realists, men of nature,. god-like, he proceeds to present them as natural autobiographers consumed by an enormous and unembarrassed self-love, and stands them against sick men of the spirit, the romantics, Dostoevsky and Schiller. The comparison provides some good epigrams and a certain amount of metaphysics. Tolstoy's Christianity he secs as a perversion ; and drawing on Gorky he makes an excellent- novelist's portrait of the Russian: Goethe, so consummately self-portrayed, and inevitably more sympathetic to the German critic, is less vivid. Better than either is the Frederick. In all one meets Thomas Mann's macabre fascination with that part of genius which is non-human : Tolstoy sitting like a stone by the sea, Goethe retiring into the wastes of negation and Frederick, the sex-less troll. The book is frequently stimulating but is hard reading.
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