THOMAS MANN
29
At the moment at which this story appeared the so-called "mu–
sicalization" of literature had already proceeded to such a point that
Julien Benda, a few years later, was forced to direct against it
his
famous attack in
Belphegor.
More and more writers were taking
Verlaine's dictum
De La musique avant toute chose
quite literally,
and the movement was dissipating in the diffuse "tone-poems" of
Verhaeren and the crepuscular fluidities of the Maeterlinckian drama.
Any amount of vague and undefinable feeling was being purveyed
in the name of Music. But the direction that this movement had taken
was not at all what Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Wagner had in–
tended in their exaltation of music above all the other arts. For Scho–
penhauer the patterns of music corresponded to the irreducible yearn–
ings
of the human will in its effort to express itself in nature, and in
this sense of being freest from any specific contentual experience
music was to be regarded as the purest of the art-forms. But music
has its own content in sound, and the mistake of the Symbolists had
been to confuse its merely quantiative medium with the more complex
medium of words. In appropriating the Wagnerian
leitmotiv,
for
example, the Symbolists were not introducing a new literary device,
as they thought, out simply returning to those archetypal patterns
from which later study has shown that both literature and music
derive their common origin. What is the
leitmotiv
but the musical
equivalent of a symbol, or a symbol but the verbal equivalent of a
leitmotiv?
It
is not quite true, as Benda argued, that the difference
between the two arts is one of intellectual consciousness, for literature
insofar as
it
is literature and not something else is no more capable
of exact logical transcription than music. The meaning in both is
something implicit in the whole pattern into which the separate motifs
or symbols are made to fall.
If
the Wagnerian influence on 19th
century writing was so baneful in its effects, as Mann himself has
shown, it was because Wagner never managed to accomplish such a
pattern in
his
own music-dramas; they dissolved in the same romantic
Sehnsucht
out of which they were born. But in
his
strict adherence
to the mythical subject he enables us not only to measure the extent
of
his
failure but to recognize the imponderable nature of the rela–
tionship between music and literature.
Death in Venice
has been
submitted to more than one analysis in terms of musical themes
and motifs. And there is no reason why it shold not also be submitted
to a similar
analys~
in terms of color or smell. But all these separate
modes of analysis are included or subsumed in that more general
type of analysis that we must bring to the proper understanding of
the myth.
For what emerges through the highly civilized modern tone and
hushed rhetoric of this remarkable story but the fundamental pattern
