THOMAS MANN
57
recklessness of death is in life,
it
would not be life without it-and in
the center is the position of the
Homo Dei,
between recklessness and
reason, as his state is between mystic community and windy individual–
ism." Since it is man alone who can perceive these counter-positions,
since they exist only by virtue of the freedom of his mind, he is master
over them, more "aristocratic" than either life or death. More aristo–
cratic than death
"~that
is the freedom of his mind. More aristocratic
than life, too aristocratic for life, and that is the piety in his heart."
For this mastery the proper name is not reason but love; only through
love come "form and civilization, friendly, enlightened, beautiful hu–
man intercourse-always in silent recognition of the blood-sacrifice."
And the form of
The Magic Mountain
itself finally emerges as
just such a humane and loving rehearsal on the plane of the
a~thetic
of the struggle between the intellectual and the emotional, the ab–
stract and the concrete, the epical and the mythical as is traced out
in Hans' experience on the mountain. It is, in Mann's own words, a
"dialectic novel." This is to say that it is a work which can hardly be
expected to meet with the wholehearted approval of those who believe
either that art should be the precise reflection of an organic culture,
as in Greek tragedy or the medieval romance, or that it should provide
a consistent correspondenec to some systematized body of intellectual
dogma, as in Lucretius or Dante. To the first the answer must be that,
in the absence of an organic cultural situation, Mann, like the other
ambitious writers of his generation, had no choice but to base his struc–
ture on the tension that must always exist during the period of transi–
tion between one culture and the next. Where Pound, Joyce, Eliot,
and the other heirs of the Symbolist tradition solve the problem
through a formal juxtaposition of the symbols of past and present
which renders any explicit comment unnecessary, Mann dissolves the
modern world itself into its contradictions and makes of the dynamic
interplay between them at once the structure and the meaning of his
work.
As
for the second objection, Mann's intelligence and imaginative
insight have prevented him from the first from any belief that it is
possible for the artist to work out a body of absolute doctrine that
has not already been thoroughly absorbed into the concrete active
experience of the race. For the particular type of aesthetic solution
that he offers we must turn ·for a precedent to such works of the past
as also belong to a transitional period between two cultural epochs, to
such writers as Chaucer and Cervantes, for example, whose tone,
style, and mixture of literary
genres
reflect the same precariously
maintained equilibrium. These comparisons must never be pressed
too far, of course, but they help us realize that final evaluation of a
work of literature is inseparable from evaluation of the culture of
which it is an expression.
