HUMANISM IN THOMAS MANN
167
settlement falls due. Possibly, too, the author may have intended
to
present in his two principal characters, the somber and solitary Lever–
kuhn and the benevolent, ever-fluent Zeitblom, two aspects of German
civilization, the man of intuition and the man of culture. But as is
almost always the case with Mann's symbols they seem, as
if
by
design, to leave incomplete the circle which they would purportedly
draw around reality. For, after all, the Devil keeps his promise to
the composer, who becomes by such means a musical genius of
Beethoven's stature, gloriously accomplishing
his
life as an artist at
the cost of his life as a man. It is hardly necessary to indicate where
we should end
if
we were to pursue this parallel into the actual
political world. Here, as elsewhere in Mann, allegory forms less a
single system than a series of consonances, refractions, and echoes,
than an effort to find, for a brief moment, underlying correspondences.
To read
Doctor Faustus
as a complete political allegory would be to
judge it in the first place as a didactic piece of propaganda, and
in the second as internally contradictory.
Other great writers in the German language of the same genera–
tion as Mann, or of the generation immediately following his own,
have tried to fuse into one whole the secrets of magic and those
hardly less dangerous secrets of wisdom; others have looked, like
him, to some half-esoteric theory of knowledge for an explanation
of the universe afforded neither by the bourgeois nor the revolu–
tionary materialism of their time; others, too, have opposed the prin–
ciple of contradiction. Allegory or myth may serve as common de–
nominator for minds wholly unlike in other respects and completely
foreign to each other: Spengler and Kassner, Gundolf and Jung,
Rilke and George, Kafka, Jiinger, and Kayserling show traces here
and there of the vitalism of Paracelsus, the Orphism of Goethe's last
years, the Titanism of Holderlin, Navalis' angelic theurgy, or the sub–
versive Zoroastrianism of Nietzsche. All have to some extent inherited
views which are humanistic in part, and in part hermetic, passed
down from the German Renaissance to German Romanticism; all
have tried to transcend human destiny in terms of universal destiny;
all have followed, or caught some glimpse of, methods for developing
knowledge which engage the will or the imagination; all have
sought for a truth too near the center of things not to be
also
subterranean.
