Thomas Mann
Essays of Three Decades. By Thomas Mann. Translated by H. T. Lowe-Porter. (Seeker and Warburg. 21s.)
THOMAS MANN speaks of Goethe as representative of those five hundred years from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries " which we .call the bourgeois epoch." He backs his point with a vast armament of learning, perception, allusion and suggestive skill. And that very armament drove my attention away from Goethe and set me wondering where, on any analogous approach, we place Thomas Mann. Roland, perhaps, to Goethe's Charlemagne—Roland sounding the-horn in the Pyrenean defile as the last of the rearguard succumb? But Roland was a good deal stupider than Thomas Mann, or the Song did not do Roland justice. Oliver would be a more fair comparison ; Oliver was not stupid. But Dr. Mann has the advantage again ; his voice is indeed the horn of Roland ; a far- reaching voice, a voice of depth and power. A certain pomp clings to it, but that is not unbecoming. A man who wields those weapons of strength and sensitivity, who writes with such generalship, is entitled to a little pomp. Surely he is the last of the rearguard. Here is his collection of essays, lectures and occasional pieces done between 1910 and 1938. Where, today or tomorrow, will the middle class find time and space to write with such leisure and confidence and splendour?
He speaks in one essay (on Kleist's Amphitryon) of a book he would have liked to write- " a critique of those dear and precious great old books, the ones towards which one has special personal relations of love and insight. The treatment should be fresh and immediate, untrammelled as though the works themselves had just appeared in print. If I were certain of living to be a hundred, I would make a start on this series."
That was in 1926. Dr. Mann did not, unfortunately, have that arrogant certainty of long life which he attributes to Goethe—and which, as he shows in that exhaustive and irrefutable way of his, was an attribute of Goethe's huge stature in life and letters. He will not write that book. But there is a great deal in Essays of Three Decades to show with what magnificence it would have been done.
To return to Goethe as Representative of the Bourgeois Age. This (Dr. Mann's lecture at the Berlin Academy of Arts on the hundredth anniversary of Goethe's death) brings Goethe to life in detail and in outline before the reader's eyes ; Goethe less, in this instance, as a literary artist than as a manifestation of the life force, a figure stand- ing out in extraordinary dimensions, but human, against the confused backcloth of his day. What it does not succeed in doing is to identify Goethe With bourgeoisie or aristocracy, with this age or that. True, Dr. Mann was not here talking only about Goethe. He was making a personal declaration of faith, a statement of fundamental adherence to the bourgeois republic. In 1932 such a declaration by Thomas Mann meant a great deal. To assess these essays one has often to place them in the context of their time. None is, however, a propaganda piece in the first instance.
Personal impulses, too, compel Dr. Mann to neglect the simpler for the apparently more difficult task. He will come at his subject from an angle, seeking a special interpretative approach, impelled to complicate in order, it would seem, that the ultimate triumph of simplification may be the greater. One prefers from him that " immediate, untrammelled " treatment ; for when he does attempt it, when he can bring himself to make a frontal attack on a plain subject, he is unsurpassed. The essay Chamisso is of this kind. To his examination of The Marvellous Tale of Peter Schlemihl Dr. Maim brings delightful freshness and skill. I recollect having been bothered at an early age by that question of Peter Schlemihl's shadow ; could not a man reasonably hope to get along without one? " Well, no matter," remarks Dr. Mann.
" Precisely the impossibility of checking up on and deciding this question is the real point of the book ; granting the premise, every- thing follows with shattering consistency. . . . The deciding factor is that the author managed from the start to convince us of the value and importance of a good healthy shadow for the respectability of a human being. So that we find such expressions as ' sinister secret' only a bit exaggerated ; we are prepared to see a man without a shadow as the most afflicted and repulsive being under the sun."
As Dr. Mann points out, Peter Schlemihl is not particularly suit- able for the young. As a boy I had some difficulty in accepting the premise, though Chamisso's matter-of-fact narrative ended by convincing me—and particularly the episode of the painter whom Peter Schlemihl sounded on the possibility of painting a man an artificial shadow:
" The artist makes the chilling reply that a man who has no shadow should not walk in the sun, that is the safest and most reasonable way—and quits him with a ' piercing' look."
It is a great service to have such things recalled and illuminated. These are mere specimens from a collection that includes aesthetics, philosophy and social history ; Lessing, Wagner, Tolstoy and Freud. Mr. Lowe-Porter has done a first-class translation.
JOHN MIDGLEY.
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