THOMAS MANN
63
in
both senses of the word, the literal and the symbolical, but it is only
in the symbolical that he can become so today. It is in the sense of
an example, a model, a guide to "a free and enlightened humanity"
that the suffering artist of the early Mann stories achieves his epiphany
in Jvseph.
Is such a conception of art and the artist likely to sound too
mystical for modem ears? The answer must be that it becomes mystical
only if we fail to distinguish between myth as a process, as a formal
pattern undergoing continuous modification and change of content,
and myth as a fixed and immutable conformation of experience. In
the heroic myth Mann has attempted to provide a final solution to
the problem of tradition and progress-the problem that had been
argued to the death by Naphta and Settembrini in
The Magic
Mou~
tain.
Perhaps the solution may be stated in terms of the old distinction
between form and content: while the archetypal form of experience
remains constant and invariable, its content undergoes profound differ–
entiation from age to age, from culture to culture. Although there is
no progress in the form, which is to be defined as the perpetually
recurrent pattern of birth and rebirth, there is a kind of progress in
the context of historical conditions in terms of which the heroic indi–
vidual must work out his salvation. For the unilinear and altogether
mechanical view of progress of the 19th century, Mann substitues a
description that has much more in common with that of Hegel and
Marx. But it must immediately be added that in the important func–
tion that he assigns to tradition he is to be sharply distinguished both
from the master of German idealism and the father of economic de–
terminism.
The great difference between these three sharers in the same gen–
eral mode of thinking is to be looked for
in
the
ground
on which the
dialectic process of history is made to occur. By ground is meant of
course field of reality, and about the nature of reality
thert~
must
always be considerable disagreement between philosopher and poet.
For Hegelian idealism the field of reality was first and last the rational
intellect, in which the Divine Idea was able
in
the course of the ages
to progress by dialectic stages to its supreme culmination in the Prus–
sian state. Such a description had the excellent advantage of recon–
ciling eighteenth-century subjectivism with the emergent optimism of
the nineteenth; for in the history of philosophy also
it
is possible to
trace out a dialectic interplay between the new and the old. So also
Marx, while recognizing the appropriateness of the triadic method for
a revolutionary theory of political economy, was forced to redefine
the ground of Hegelian metaphysics in terms more in keeping with
the scientific materialism of his time. But, contrary to the often quoted
statement of Engels, Marx did not actually tum Hegel "upside down";
