THOMAS MANN
27
in the latter. In other words, Mann turns to an etiology of the case
whose symptoms he has either recorded analytically or demonstrated
in his Gallery of Horrors. The health of the Buddenbrooks, their
material and social well-being, with all that this had entailed of inner
psychological stability for the individual members of the tribe, de–
teriorates in exact proportion to the development and refinement of
their sensibility. Not until the third generation, it is true, do the evi–
dences of this twofold process of growth and decay begin to show
themselves in character and action. 'But it becomes distinct the mo–
ment that Gotthold, retracing the ancient pattern of Ishmael and
Isaac, !,-bandons his patrimony to his younger brother for the sake of
a life of aimless romantic wandering. And the sister Antonie betrays
all that dangerous restlessness of the spirit in its search for an adequate
resting-place that can only lead to disgrace and death.
As
for Thomas
Buddenbrooks himself, the inheritor of the family "blessing" in every
sense of the word, it must always be a question whether it was the
reading of Schopenhauer in the summer-house or the defection of his
heart that brought about his too early death, together with the utter
destruction of the business. He has already reinforced the foreign virus
in the Buddenbrooks bloodstream through his marriage with the dark,
exotic, and music-loving Gerda. And through Gerda the whole malady
that is creeping in upon the Buddenbrooks takes on a more definite
form through its identification with art. Despite his father's foreboding
protestations, little Hanno cannot help but acquire that mastery of
the piano which will enable him to improvise a swan-song for his race.
The unconscious generations have labored only to bring forth this
sick child, this incipient artist of the keyboard, this precocious scoffer,
whose death is made an irrefutable rejection of everything for which
they had stood. For
Buddenbrooks
is not only a study in the genesis
of the bourgeois artist-type; it is also a definitive evaluation of bour–
geois society as a whole. Nothing in modern literature gives us a more
concentrated image of that society'S will-to-death than little Hanno's
refusal, at the height of his fever, to hear "the clear, fresh, mocking
summons" of life. "But if he shudders when he hears life's voice, if
the memory of that vanished scene and the sound of that lusty sum–
mons make him shake his head, make him put out his hand to ward
it off as he flies forward in the way of escape that has opened to him–
then it is clear that the patient will die."
Love, disease, and death- these themes are already clearly iden–
tified with the notion of art in Mann's first long book. Far from being
a Balzacian parabola of monomaniac passions or a Zolaesque diagram
of socio-economic forces,
Buddenbrooks
traces the downward-moving
spiral process by which beauty is produced only at the cost of all the
"normal" values, by which the powers of light and darkness are kept
