Thomas Mann .

Stories of Three Decades. By Thomas Mann. Translated by

H. T. LoWe-POrter. (Martin Seeker and Warburg. 10s. 6d.) ' ■

To have under one cover all the. shorter stories of Thomas Mann is both convenient and fascinating. The whole of his creative work is here; from 1896 to the present day, with the exception of the four long novels, Buddenbrooks, Royal Highness, The Magic Mountain, and the recent trilogy, Tales of Jacob. Such -stories as Tonio Kroger and Death in Venice have long been admired in England, but there are many less familiar pieces in this vo)ume, notably the charming idyll, A Man and His Dog, which are sure to extend the circle of his readers. The unevenness of the collection is no greater than was to be expected, and its completeness illumines for us the spiritUal development of one of the most significant of contemporary Eurapean-riters.— Thomas Mann hardly ever tells a story for its own sake. • Indeed it is extraordinary how round and real his characters contrive to be since they seem to proceed in the first place, from their creator's brain not as persons but as manifestations, symbols of this way of life or that : the artist; the solitary, the plain_ man, the failure. As he plays with Jils ,figures and clothes them, the individual does somehow emerge hOm the type; but the reader Ot twenty-four consecutive stories cannot well be unaware how persistent and significant are the types from -which they emerge. Only once, perhapi; does Mann altogether escape the tyranny of the type, in that singularly perfect tale of the inflation period which he himself seems to regard as a mere occasional piece, Disorder and Early Sorrow. Here humour and irony and sympathy are merged into one, he is proving nothing, diSsecting nothing ; while the greater part of his work, for all its brilliance and charm, is pervaded by a single set of leit-

motifs. •

Most persistent of all is the isolation-motif : isolation of race and family (The Blood of the Walsinigs), of the artist from the normal man (The Dilettante, Buddenbrooks, Tonio Kroger); at :last (in Thf A/gee Mountain),ittolation„inJhe abstract,- the -isolation not of an individual- .-but-of-a irhole community. In the earliest stories the motif takes the most

obvious shape, and the author gives constant play to an Obsession with the .horror of extreme ,ugliness or deformity,

of which echoes are to be- tonna in ,a11 his maturer work. Little Herr .Friedemann is a hunchback the the solitary Tobias Mindernickel presents so ludicrous and scrawny. a Spectacle that the children laugh at him in the street ; in Little Limy a wife and her lover publicly mbek: her husbarid'S revolting

corpulence. The typical Mann antithesis first appears in The Way to the Churchyard (1901), where Praisegod Piepsam,

a miserable, pimply-nosed, drunken failure, is thrown into a fit of blind rage by the mere sight of a blithe young cyclist with " eyes like blue lightnings " and a thiek'sheaf of blond hair beneath a saucy cap.

Ah, that blond hair, those blue eyes ! TOui simply pretty, how richly symbolic they appear to the German mind ! To the unhappy Piepsam they stand for, Life itself ; by the time we reach Tonio Kroger (1903), " the artist With i bad

conscience " (in fact Mann himself), they haire beeon4 the

hallmark of the happy, handsome, unreflective.:breect of men who live in friendliness and harmony with all the world." Other writers, Samuel Butler for instance,..have voiced a similar approval of the plain, unthinking man ; but in the German author it is more than approval: it is lOve, a yearning love insecurely .comperiSated by respect for knowledge and the critical faculty. _ No wonder, we reflect, that.the German liberals capitulated so easily to a Weltanschauung that was already half their. own. And yet how moving is the, homage paid by Tonio Kreger, the Super.subtle`•artist;'-tO the --titire7 flective simplicity of his boyhood's loves,. Hans,. Hansen in his sailor suit and the laughing Ingeborg Holm_:._ " Had I forgotten you ? " he asked. " No, never. Not thee, Hans, not thee, Inge the fair ! It was always you I worked for '• when I heard applause I always Stole a look to see if you Were,thhre. . . . TO be like you! To begin again, to grew up like you., regular like you, simple and normal and cheerful, in conformity and under- standing with God and man, beloved of the innocent and happy. To take you, Ingeborg Holm, to wife, and have.a son like you, Rana Hansen—to live free from the curse of knowledge and the torment of creation, live and praise God in blessed mediocrity -I " Well, time has brought - about- the • apotheosis-- et Hans Hansen. You may see him marching blithely about Germany

in his thousands, " always spending his time in some right and proper occupation." Instead of his sailor suit, he wears the brown uniform of the Hitlerjugend, soon to be

changed to Arbeitsdienst khaki, then for another two years to sky-blue or field-grey, and at last to brown again, the storm-trooper's brown. He is pe,rfectly happy; do not -doubt it ; • neither marvel that his eyes should be so clear, for he has neither time nor temptation to trouble them with reflection or criticism. He Will do and believe what, he is told se instinctively and so gaily that while you are with him you cannot resent it. But once turn your eyes away, from the pretty pioture and consider the windows of the bookshopS, the teaching in school and university, the crazy myths and the ugly lies ; what then are you to do ? -Eecome a Gauleiter ? Write patriotic lyrics to stolidly diatonic march tunes ? Or withdraw to Switzerland in ironic exile, sadly aware that the glorification of the unreflective, like patriotism, is not enough :

is indeed a European calamity ? - Mann's awareness of the danger found expression in the last of.these stories, Mario and the Magician (1929), a political allegory wherein a sinister conjurer shamefully paralyses the

freedom and diverts the will-power of an Italian village community. Now not only Mario, but Huns Hansen, is in the magician's power, and a companion piece might have been expected ; but Thomas Mann has averted his ironic eyes from the Teutonic scene to, rest them in the haze of biblical antiquity, so that in Germany the :Works, of the greatest living German novelist are still tolerated, unenthusiastically.

' DESMOND SHAWE-TAYLOR.