68
PARTISAN REVIEW
which turns the ideal of "a free and enlightened humanity" into a grim
and shameful farce.
If
we are to judge Mann as Troy proposes to judge him, we must
reject him and all his works.
It
is only by introducing a reasonable and
proper separation-by insisting that Mann as novelist is
not
in every re–
spect Mann the prophet and philosopher and politician, by maintaining
that there are values in his novels having a relative independence of social
and political values-that we can continue to accept the novels. Our judg–
ments of the value of works of art are in the last analysis linked with
the whole structure of our value judgments_ That is why I, for one, find
in Mann's final "frank and open exploitation of the myth" not what Troy
does : the fruitful culmination of his earlier work, the climax and apotheo–
sis of his achievement; but the proof of failure. By reverting to the myth,
Mann has shown not his solution of but his inability to solve the problem
of
The Magic Mountain.
He has turned from the challenge of his own
times, a challenge so magnificently recognized and explored in his early
and middle work, back to a refuge which for all its glittering exterior
is inhabited by dead bones only. And as these last years of his show, he
will find as he continues in residence there that one by one those bright
creatures of the mind and spirit, so wonderfully alive in his great novels
and stories, will sicken also, and die.
(William Troy will reply to James Burnham in the next iSJue.)
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