HUMANISM IN THOMAS MANN
165
opera. Music in Proust remains firmly established in the domain of
aesthetic realization; only in seeking formal perfection does it rise
beyond the sensory, and thence to that world of Platonic recollection
toward which all Proust's work is directed. For Mann, on the con–
trary, music reopens the portals of night. It plunges the human
creature once more into secret depths of the universe, into the heart
of a telluric world both above and below man's sphere, like the
Goethean world of the Mothers. The concept of immortality to which
Proust attains through music counts less for Mann than the concept
of eternity.
R eflections of a Non-Political Man:
this title given by the
novelist to a collection of essays published in 1918 is still, despite
all appearances, wholly applicable to the rest of his work, to the last.
1
It would be idle to try to explain his novels by his successive reactions
to the political tragedies of his day: he can even be said to have
adopted the same semi-detached attitude toward the events of his
century as Goethe and Erasmus each held with regard to their own
times; if, like convex mirrors, his books reflect a condensed image
of Germany over the past fifty years
it
is precisely because he has
refused to mix techniques of journalism in with those of fiction. And
yet Mann's initial pessimism was a normal reaction of German
in–
telligence in presence of the gross optimism of the period, smugly ma–
terialistic and rigidly militaristic, and doomed to a bad end; the
daemonism of his later writings has been confirmed by that release
of elemental forces and deadly ideologies which have swept over
Germany, and the world, for more than thirty years. His conception
of illness, so essential in his work, has been imposed upon him
in
part by his study of these great ailing bodies. But when Mann does
describe morbid symptoms in the body politic he sees them only as
the most conspicuous and most external indications of an evil in–
herent, first of all, in Being itself. The feeling for biological fact, on
the one hand, and the obsession with metaphysical problems, on the
other, which together have protected him in his novels from mere
1 We are concerned here only with Mann as novelist, so this is not the
place to discuss the content of those particular essays in which he undertook, like
so many German writers of his time, to defend Germany's imperialist policy.
The fact is recalled here only to show that in the interminable dialogue between
Joachim and Hans Castorp the author was slow to break with Joachim's point
of view.
