THOMAS MANN had his fame here, of course, but it
was always tempered by a slight suspicion which I (although an admirer of Mann) never found surprising in my compatriots. His genius flowered from the conflict between his fundamental (very German) romanticism and his (equally German) intel- lectual self-searchings. He was, in other words, for all the greatness of his liberal humanism, a shade too self-conscious for English taste. I thought that this faintly uneasy attitude was most adequately summed up in one sentence in The Times which suggested that `as a novelist Mann was German, all too German.' He saw Germany itself as Doktor Faustus, and although it is probably true that, as the Manchester Guardian cautiously said, 'as a generalisation about Germany and the German mind in their historical actuality it is misleading,' I think that no more disturbing reflection of Germany's last collapse will ever be created in terms of art. He was certainly among the greatest writers of this century. I met him only once, after a lecture he gave at London University during the Goethe celebrations a few years ago. But I cannot remember what he looked like or what he said on that occasion. The great have indeed a way of being most disconcertingly ordinary.
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