Lag Light GOETHE, Schiller and Thomas Mann—the long isosceles triangle
stretches forward over a cen- tury and a half; in this posthumous volume of essays the only German writer of comparable stature to those two curiously assorted friends has his last say on both of them. It is an odd volume in some ways. We are told, for instance, that the essays are here printed in book form for the first time; but the essay on Chekhov, which was delivered as a wireless talk, appeared in Mr. John Morris's Third Programme anthology pub- lished in 1955 by the Nonesuch Press. No transla- tor was mentioned there, and Mann in fact delivered the talk in English; now we learn, how- ever, that it was translated by Tania and James Stern, though there is no reference to Tania on the jacket, just as Richard Winston stands there alone as translator of the essays on Goethe, Schiller and Nietzsche, though inside Richard and Clara Winston appear together. And at the end of the book there is added a short story of Mann's, `A Weary Hour,' which is about Schiller, as an appendix to the Schiller essay, and we learn that it was translated by Mrs. Lowe-Porter (still easily the best of Mann's translators), though there was no mention of any translator in the original (1936) collected edition of Mann's short stories.
All in all, the bibliographers are going to have a high old time one day, and while they are having it I beg them not to miss the fine irony contained in the list of Mann's principal works included in this volume, with their dates and places of original publication. From 1898 to 1933 this was `Berlin, S. Fischer Verlag.' But in 1933 some little local difficulties arose in Germany, and the third volume of Joseph is classified 'Vienna, Bermann-Fischer Verlag.' Alas, the Wandering Gentile (not to men- tion his Jewish publishers) found no resting-place in Vienna either, and from 1938 it is 'Stockholm, Bermann-Fischer Verlag.' But all things pass in God's good time, and in 1947 the last of Mann's works to be published in Stockholm appeared; it was—irony within iron y—Doktor Faustus, Mann's great allegory of the nation—his nation —that had trafficked with the devil, which ends with that great cry, 'A lonely man folds his hands and speaks; God be merciful to thy poor soul, my friend, my Fatherland.' From then on the good Herr Fischer is back in business on his own and in Frankfurt-am-Main.
The four subjects treated here—Schiller, Goethe, Chekhov and Nietzsche—are perfectly designed to demonstrate the breadth of Mann's genius. For Schiller, the arch-romantic, Mann
turns romantic too; 'Don Carlos—how shall I ever forget the first passion for language kindled in me by its glorious verse when I was a boy of fifteen?' But the romanticism is never allowed to obscure the perception of the critic.
Romanticism had always aimed at union of popular with highbrow art; but its means for accomplishing this were clever and debased; a mixture of subtlety and childlike simplicity which imparts a quality of corruptness to all romantic popular art. The whole . . . difference between nobility and ambitious cleverness, is inherent in this: that in Schiller not a trace of cynicism can be found. What he achieved in Tell was classical popularity.
For Goethe, the polymath, the last man to know everything there was to know, and about whom Mann brought off triumphantly that most appal- lingly difficult of feats, the historical novel with the real protagonists, Mann spreads his intel- lectual wings in what he calls a fantasy, but what is in fact a piece of stunningly acute analysis of a mind so closely attuned to his own.
Mann's whole life and work was testimony to his belief in the artist's effect on the world and the world on him. Whether it is the struggle be- tween art, life and disease, in which the allies are liable so disconcertingly to change sides, or the present view of Goethe as the man who 'knew the power of stupidity,' the man who, in Wilhelm Meister, had railed against those who were 'await- ing the coming ruin without the courage to call in intelligence,' he never lets us forget that the artist is never alone, however many doors he may lock behind him. The essay on Nietzsche here printed is called Nietzsche's philosophy in the light of recent history.' It never mentions Nazism, yet the exquisite balance of what is in fact an elaborate apologia for Nietzsche is irradiated throughout by Mann's knowledge of both the sense and the non- sense talked about his subject's unintentional influence. Here, again, he comes back to his perennial theme of the artist and disease (political disease this time) when he speaks of 'a close relationship which we have every reason to ponder; that of aestheticism and barbarism,' and adds, 'Toward the end of the nineteenth century the ill-omened proximity, of these two was not yet seen, felt or feared,' yet points out at the same time that 'Nietzsche's glorification of barbarism is simply an excess of his aesthetic drunkenness.'
Reading this book reminds us once again not only of the scope of Mann's genius but also of the profundity of his insight. His mind was like a great beacon illuminating the work and thought of the giants of whom he wrote. Page after page of these essays is lit up with some shaft that reveals another layer of meaning in its subject. It was Goethe, who knew everything, that died asking for more light. It was Mann, more than a hundred years later, who provided it.
BERNARD LEVIN
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