34
PARTISAN REVIEW
good because he regenerates the bourgeois invalids; Cipolla is evil
because he threatens to demolish them.
In
his
treatment of Cipolla and Peeperkom, Mann's irony
is
drowned in a definite aspiration and dread. And here his method of
analysis, having risen to the peak of its vision, ceases to function.
Mann's choice of the "middle road" and
his
personal allegiance to
social-democratic politics,
his
dreams of good will embodied in Pee–
perkom and Joseph and his hatred and fear of Cipolla, are not nec–
essary conclusions of the organic-analogical scheme. It is perhaps
more to his credit that his individual decency alone separates
him
from
his
fatherland; as for his philosophy, any decision could have
been made consistent with it. For no fact in nature, history or human
society can remain firm against the analogizing capacity of Art.
Thus the Values of Art become in practice the Value of Will, of
pure pragmatism-whether the "infamous pragmatism" which Mann
so much deplores in the present rulers of Germany, or the creative
pragmatism of the decent man, which he urges democratic govern–
ments to adopt. Will and its personifications become the sole stand–
ards of man's needs and capacities. .Such are the fluid and essentially
irresponsible principles which Mann opposes to science and to
Marxism.*
So much for Measure and Value. We come now to the final ele–
rrlent of Mann·s political thesis: his theory of
co~ervative
revolution.
Mann's Theory of Change: The Non-radical Revolution
Marxism points to historical processes as determining the modi–
fications that occur in art, rhetoric; the imagery of folk-lore, arid other
social forms of the individual imagination. In making an analysis of a
poem or a novel, Marx and Engels
examine~
the changing social and
cultural combinations of the countries that produced them. In contrast,
it is characteristic of the analogist that he looks to art and to the dreams
*
From
Mario,
the transition to the 'pure myth' of
Joseph
is a logical development, in
tht
moral sense. By applying his method to eroded images of the past, Mann declares his unwilling·
ness to continue tampe.-ing with contemporary mores; instead he attempts to strengthen them
with his political speeches. Mann,s passage from the subject of modern man in his "universal"
aspects to that of man "in his state and standing in the universe"
is
thw
a movement towards
the
right.
For in spite of the most conservative intentions, his analysis,
10
long as it continued
to touch upon the situation which gave rise to it, could not escape the
radicalism
of the middle
class-historic destroyer of all Values.
The Great Leader now talr.es his place in The Eternal, while in the practical world Mana
commits himself to the cautious and contradictory behavior of the "democratic" mediocrity and
to the mild ·"aristocracy" or
good
behavior without intoxicating overtones. But the purification
or his art through release from realistic facton has by no means the effect, as some critics
maintain, or raising the Joseph work to a higher level of philosophic completeness-it simply
turns the method inside out. IC in
His Royal High'li1ss, The Magic Mountain, Butltl•nbrools,
and
Mario,
Mann sought to make history into a myth, in the
]oSiph
cycle he wishes to present
a myth as history.
As
a result
his
art now discards
the
hard substance of contemporary life which
his irony-machine had been pounding to
a
pulp; and the loss is felt in the relaxed and bulbous
quality or his prose.
