l'ID
'PA 'R.TlSAN IHVlEW
leaves off myth takes on. Imbedded
in
the heavy ore of everyday
existence and formed to be seen only by watchful eyes, myth is for
him
but a more hidden explanation.
Accustomed as we are to an almost academic definition of the
term
humanism,
we may ask whether or not a mind so concerned
with the irrational, and sometimes with the occult, so open to change
as almost to welcome chaos, can still be called
humanist.
Mann has
himself given something like an answer in advance to this question
when in trying to define the ultimate significance of Freud's work
he speaks of a "humanism of the future" which will recognize truths
about mankind quite unknown to the humanism of the past. Cer–
tainly Mann deserves an appellation which in our time no longer
applies exclusively to lovers of ancient culture based on the study of
man, but which tends more and more to designate a philosophy and
way of life founded upon human values. He rightly belongs to that
series of minds who are traditionalist in that they take full stock of
past riches, but revolutionary in that they are constantly reinterpreting
human thought and conduct; experience makes them prudent, and
they are often secretive out of necessity; for them all arts and sci–
ences, myth and dream, the known and the unknown, and human
substance itself are alike the objects of an investigation which will
go on as long as mankind endures. In our day, when man is cut off
from his normal environment by too rapid and too dangerous acqui–
sitions, when he discards the past but dreads the future, elated and at
the same time disturbed he seems less capable than ever of self-ex–
amination or of objective appraisal of the world; in such a time the
novel as developed by Thomas Mann stands out as one of the rare
contemporary productions which persist in seeing us
sub specie vitae
et sub specie mortis, sub specie saeculi et sub specie aeternitatis.
(Translated from the French
by Grace Frick, in collaboration with the author)
