HUMANISM IN THOMAS MANN
161
pletion until the very end of his life. Only from the time of the
mythological comedy of
joseph and His Brothers
does there enter
increasingly into his novels an element of reassurance, and what might
almost be called banter, the kind of involuntary scherzo which fre–
quently predominates in any great writer who has reached his later
maturity. In that medieval ballad,
The Holy Sinner,
Mann's more
secret themes appear, thinly disguised in Gothic forms, in the freedom
afforded by masquerade; the absurd dangers of the human adventure
are surmounted now with the sly facility of the dreamer-who-knows–
that-he-dreams: forbidden love between brother and sister, and then
between mother and son, bears sanctified fruit; the author's use of
Old French turns the lovers' talk, in their incestuous bed, into a
scholarly diversion. The libertine tale,
The Transposed Heads,
treats
the Oriental, and Hegelian, motif of perpetual change in the lightest
of tones.
The Black Swan
resumes the sensuous themes of
Death in
Venice
after an interval of forty years, but transposes them into a
domestic key:
.a
highly susceptible matron is the leading character
here, instead of a man won over in spite of himself; intimate house–
hold scenes make a setting of bourgeois comfort for the horrors of
that Dance of Death. These later novels occupy a position in Mann's
writings somewhat similar to that of
The Winter's Tale
or
Cymbeline
in the work of Shakespeare. Pessimism and optimism alike have been
left behind; the world of fixed forms, and of moving forms, too, order
and disorder, life-in-death and death-in-life, these have become dif–
ferent aspects of one MYSTERIUM MAGNUM now grown thor–
oughly familiar to this wise old alchemist. A sense of play is gradually
taking the place of the sense of danger.
With
Doctor Faustus
this scherzo turns strident, with desperate
undertones, like the music of irony and terror in the
Apocalypse
of
Adrian Leverkiihn, musician and principal character of that alarm–
ing book. Jest and danger are coupled here, like two monsters face
to face on
.a
cathedral door. Never has Mann gone farther in art
and strategy than in this novel, where in a fugue-like movement three
themes, political, theological, and ethical, prepare for, and later pro–
long, the theme about music itself; in turn, the problem of music
becomes one with the problem of the Understanding, of its limits
and the price paid for crossing those bounds. The will to learn how to
live, and the individual's accord with life's very rhythm, such impor-
