BOOKS
525
Modesty, Mann remarks, is a lovely word, and we must know
where to look for it in him.
If
one aspect of the "lived myth," the "life
of reanimation" is pride, another is the modesty of playfulness, the
smile. In "Freud and the Future" Mann talks of his own
imitat:·o
Goethe, "the childish identification with a father image elected out of
profound affinity," the mythical point of view become subjective-and
a little ironic.
It
is in the four essays on Goethe, then, that we should
expect Mann's essential apologia.
In Goethe, we are told, mastery in art and the human quality of
egoism are seen for the first time as inseparable; he is the type of "the
great man in poet's form," the Artist as Hero. Conscious of his own
role, he names the spring of his own being;
"Ehrfurcht vor sich selbst,"
Goethe calls that passion which motivates all autobiography (for Mann
art is nothing else), and makes the romantic, spoilt-darling demand on
the world: to be loved, to be loved!
But the passionate sense of the self does not stop at art, indeed,
destroys its integrity; more than a creator, the writer must become a
"Prince of Life," the highest representative of culture and humanity.
There is the word at last which Mann inscribed on his title page.
The love of the ego becomes, symbolically, the love of humanity;
the lonely debate of the narcissist is seen as the classroom lecture, the
public speech. For the eminent man is, mythically, all mankind; the his–
tory of the relationship with himself is everyone's paradigm; subjectively,
he makes the leap in passion from his beloved "I" to the great Thou of
the world.
Notice, it is the
"great
Thou" of abstraction, not man, but man–
kind. The writer has not turned to humanity via the small "thou" of
his neighbor, and, in the end (as Mann sees in Tolstoy, his other Goethe ),
he continues to love concretely,
really,
only himself. We are not con–
vinced by Mann's self-assurance that there is "more grace" in such a
plight than in sainthood.
The idolatry goes even further; for not humanity alone, but
divinity
inheres in the great writer. He is godlike, his home a shrine, his evoca–
tion a way to salvation. Here, I think, is a clue to the equivocal love
of death that binds Mann and Wagner in a common guilt: the self is a
dying god, a god of death. To have death in the heart is not only, as
Mann explains in the essay on Platen, the function of an "unsatisfying"
egoism, egoism without public acclaim, but of the whole impulse to
deify the ego.
The study of Platen, taken together with the splendid intuition of
"Death in Venice," illuminates the terrible linking of narcissism, homo–
sexuality, and death, and evokes with apparent impertinence the name
of Don Quixote, on which in another context the book closes. Don
Quixote is, after all, to the point, the delightful self-betrayal the artist
