Books of the Day
Genius and Greatness
IF one is asked who is the greatest living novelist—and I find that the passion for hierarchies is such that people are always asking the question—it is difficult not to answer : Thomas Mann. No other novelist has quite the same degree of universality, of relevance, even of artistic perfection. And yet a novelist, properly speaking, he has never been. Buddenbrooks is a chronicle, The Magic Mountain a pathological document, and the Jacob and Joseph series decorative expansions of legend : in all these books there is beauty of style, dramatic incident, psychological insight, but no formal unity, no inner plastic coherence. It is only in the short stories—in Death in Venice, Toni Kruger and Mario the Magician—that subject and shape are mutually dependent, and remain perfectly poised in the mind long after the time of reading. In the present case the theme or situation has been selected with an absolute instinct for what is romantic and resonant, and full of moral profit. But it is an historical incident, and that to begin with demands special precautions History is so ch :Iced with unessentials, so empty of emotional intimacy ; and the novelist who ventures into its realm comes into conflict with that "odd law" which, as Henry James said, "always makes the minimum of valid suggestion serve the man of imagination better than the maximum." The Weimar of Goethe's time, the scene of this new novel, is simply packed with valid suggestion. Thomas Mann has the right impulse in selecting, as his " found " situation, the moment when an old lady turned sixty, none other than the Lotte of Goethe's Werther, turns up in Weimar to visit the man whom she remembered as a mad youth who, forty-four years before, had burned with love for her, and who had transmuted their renunciation of this love into a romance which had swept the world like a forest-fire in a whirlwind.
The book opens with Lotte's arrival in Weimar. shortly after eight o'clock one morning in October, 1816. She is recognised by the waiter, and while she is sleeping off the fatigue of the journey, he spreads the sensational news. She wakes two hours later to find the hotel besieged by a curious crowd, with an
- _ ...._.. English miss, more adventurous that the rest, waiting outside the bedroom door ready to add Lotte to her album of sketches of European celebrities. Miss Cuzzle's visit lasts a mere matter of three-quarters of an hour. It is followed by a formal Call from Dr. Riemer, Goethe's secretary, and he talks for some two hours, partly about Goethe, but mostly about himself. He is followed immediate!), by Adele Schopenhauer, the sister of the philosopher but more significantly the friend and confidante ot the girl to whom Goethe's son August is engaged. Lotte is still in her dressing-jacket and has had no focd—not even the cup of bouillon which the waiter tried to press on her—but this visit, which must have lasted a good three hours, is followed by one from August himself, also of substantial duration.
The chapters which record these successive visits are imaginary
conversations in the manner of - Landor and they serve several purposes. They give the reader a vivid impression of the Weimar milieu, they allow us to see Goethe through three separate pairs of eyes, they permit long discussions on the habits and idiosyn- crasies of an exemplary man of genius. They are followed, abruptly, by a long "interior monologue" from the great man himself—not a realistic exposure of the flow of consciousness such as James Joyce gave us in Ulysses, but an artificial, self- analytical essay more in the manner of Brow aing's Bishop Biougram, all clipped sentences and marks of exclamation. Then, four-fifths of the way through the book, we come to the scene for which all this preparation has been made—the actual meeting of Lotte and Goethe. Anything that we might call artistic unity, wholeness and interrelation, has been lost. Art, as so often in German literature, has been sacrificed to intellect. But the fifty pages of this penultimate chapter are magnificent—magnificent as evocation of the scene, as subtle penetration into character, as subdued emotional drama. The brief _final chapter, in which Goethe takes a last farewell of Lotte, is magnificent too, not so much as drama, though it is perfectly "set," bu,. as what we must call philosophy. Into the aged Goethe's lips is put a philosophy of life which is all, that great man's wisdom enounced with perfect pathos and finality.
Goethe has always fascinated Thomas Mann, and the portrait he paints of him in this bcok is the result of a life-long deliber- ation on one of the strangest manifestations of that power we call genius, and of that fallibility we call human. There is no escaping the greatness of the man—in spite of his gout, his greediness, his sensuality 'and vanity. But it is precisely the lack of coincidence between genius and greatness which exercises Mann's curiosity; Goethe himself is made to say : "A young man can be a genius, but he cannot be great. Greatness comes only with the weight, endurance, power, mental equipment of age." He reflects that love, too, matures with age: what is any youthful love beside the spiritual and intellectual strength of love in age? But through the eyes of Lotte we see a different picture. His fame, his pomp, his pomposity—it looks too much like the kingdom of a wicked emperor. And it smells of sacrifice —of the sacrificed. He may call it renunciation, but renunciation and loss lie close together, and all reality and achievement are nothing but the impaired possible. And there is something frightful, she tells Goethe, about that impairment. To which Goethe can only reply in the familiar words with which he had once expressed the essential doctrine of romanticism: feeling is all.
Goethe, said Thomas Mann on another occasion, is intimacy become greatness, and the contrast which he presents between intimacy of character and universality of genius is unique and profound. Out of that contradiction springs the contradictory attitude which he has inspired in other people—being, for example, for Germans the most typical European, for Europeans the most typical German. A study of his character, such as this book essentially is, thus becomes a direct and infinitely illumin- ating comment on the present world situation.
HERBERT READ.
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