158
PARTISAN REVIEW
tions, and is gradually made to loom as large as human destiny in
all
its forms. His caution, his daring, his slow-paced irony, and the
winding detours characteristic of his very thinking are in direct
relation to the dangers of what is for
him
still the most shocking of
all endeavors.
In the dull atmosphere of
Buddenbrooks,
or against the sultry
background of
Death in Venice,
characters weary of virtue are still
desperately resisting the solicitations of chaos: Thomas Buddenbrook,
drearily confined within
his
middle-class pattern of propriety, dies
in the service of a correct but outworn social order; the austere Gus–
tave Aschenbach defends his joyless respectability to the end against
love's insidious infection. In the shorter stories written before the year
1914, and set in provincial Germany, there
is
the same mixture of
apathy and despair: life seems to rot there under its cover of rigor
and decorum; the sole means of issue open upon dream, burning
passion, or departure to another land, and lead without fail to death.
These heroes of Mann's youth are victims of chaos; they are not yet
its explorers, and only unconsciously are they accomplices. The
daemonic force of Aschenbach's love, the erotic phantasy of Albrecht
van der Qualen in
The Wardrobe,
little Herr Friedmann's howl of
repressed desire-these are given free vent only when the tormented
one has reached the extreme brink of dissolution, or the total
irre~
sponsibility of dream. The author's severity toward those of his char–
acters who are men of letters, fugitives from bourgeois society, is in
part a precautionary device and in part a phenomenon of self-pun–
ishment. In
Tonio Kroger,
which strikes the note of sentimental
comedy in that series of otherwise tragic conflicts, the hero (through
whom Mann doubtless speaks) pleads in favor of compromise be–
tween the anarchy of the artist, which he feels within him, and the
ideal bourgeois life, which continues to be for him, somewhat naively,
a symbol both of moral rectitude and of bodily ease, of spiritual and
of physical comfort; paradoxically, it is order, or what may be called
by that name, and not disorder, which tempts Tanio Kroger.
In
The Magic Mountain
belief in daemonism triumphs for the
first time over Schopenhauerian pessimism and Stoic conformity; the
officer Joachim, martyr to rigidity and refusal, yields first place to
his
cousin Hans Castorp, whose typically bourgeois virtues are at
