MYTH AND HISTORY
29
Duty and the Great Leader
The limitless freedom of the individual to create values and to
live by them is an illusion much cherished in America; and there is
little doubt that Mann's audiences find in his speeches some such mes–
sage of spiritual liberation. The fact is, however, that Mann's notion
of the situation of the average man and of what is good for him is
something quite different from the American dream of boundless
self-expression. Not only are his characters powerless to alter the
fantasy-world in which they are submerged, but each value towards
which they tentatively stretch their hands is promptly cancelled by
its
opposite. Death, they learn, as they rock from side to side in their
intoxicating educational pilgrimages, is infamous and shameful, yet
it is also a noble, sacred, and eternal spirit; the body is indecent, or–
ganic life itself, but at the same time it is also the glorious image of
nature; honor may gain strength from the thought that "representing
is
more and higher than simply Being," yet "representing" tends to
exceed the "law-given limits of reason" and lose itself in the ritualjstic
"timeless" desert of death; feeling steeps itself in the magical changes,
until it is betrayed to the lust of death and decay-only to find that
"though honor might possess certain advantages, yet shame had
others not inferior."
Such is the ironic defeat of all human values, and science can
add little to man's power over his fate. One course only, one measure
and value, lies open before the
gemeine Mann,
the mediocrity who
conforms by not conforming: the ideal of duty, of the Middle Way, a
path continuously picked between the extremes, whatever they may
happen to be. "My idea was," said Mann, "to show my hero, who lin–
gers
now on the left side now on the right side, the middle road of life."
To this rule, however, there are exceptions. Mann's political pro–
nouncements repeatedly warn that undiluted democracy cannot be
the goal of humanity. Unwilling to yield to the Nazis the metaphysical
beauty of hierarchical order, he points scornfully to Hitler as more
plebeian than Roosevelt. Democracy, he believes, must complete it–
self
in
aristocracy-this is a rnajor measure and value. And here again,
his
abstractions glide so skilfully from one register to another that his
auditors seem to hear the music of their own higher desires, without
troubling themselves to question whether it is really in aristocracy
that they have lodged their hopes.
Above the ·muddled head of the small man with his cautiously
balanced duty rises the figure of the superior synthesis, the personifi–
cation of the Work of Art which controls destiny in the time-stricken
world of the half-real. The salvation of man is pictured in a moral
transcendence which will bring to an end his internal struggle and de-
