168
PARTISAN REVIEW
If
Mann belongs to the main current of German literature, in
direct line of descent from Goethe, it is perhaps because in abiding
simply by his calling as novelist he has learned that study and de–
scription of the average individual counteracts day-dreaming, for one
thing, and dogmatic systematization, for another. The result is that
even in the pursuit of the unknown he often evinces a kind of prag–
matism not unlike that to which Faust in the Second Part of
Faust
comes before his death. As in the commentary made by Goethe him–
self upon his
Primeval Orphic Sayings,
where seemingly ineffable
truths are voluntarily reduced to the level of somewhat prosy exhorta–
tions toward righteous living,
The Magic Mountain,
that central mas–
sif in Mann's work, tends to emphasize in the character of Hans
Castorp the simplest and most exoteric virtues, kindness, honesty,
modesty, coupling them only with the courage or common sense
needed to keep such qualities from falling, as so often happens, into
the service of longstanding or newly formed prejudice. In
Doctor
Faustus,
on the contrary, the emphasis is put upon the quality of ex–
cess in genius, to the exclusion of every virtue and every vice inherent
in the average man; but the fact that this adventure, placed like Lever–
kuhn's music itself at the highest pitch perceptible to the human ear, is
reported to us by the very commonplace character who acts as narra–
tor seems to show Mann's persistent need for upholding ordinary
humanity alongside of such genius. This pedestrian Doctor Zeitblom
analyzes even what appalls him, loves what is greater than himself,
and serves his weird hero as confidant, collaborator, and counsellor.
Nothing is more like
Gaeth~
than this use of the mean as critic of
the extreme. What we are offered here is the rather pedagogical
description of madness by reason, of the unconscious, or rather the
supraconscious by the conscious, of the wizard by the professor; that
eternal Luther incarnated in the ex-theologian Leverkiihn (who is
devil-ridden like the man of the Wartburg), is described for us by
the eternal Goethe, or rather, by the eternal Eckermann represented
here at a distinctly bourgeois level by the academic Zeitblom. It is
as though the impossible and inexpressible could not be brought to
realization in words by Mann except through this filtering substance
made up of the sensible, the prosaic, the nearly commonplace, and
in any case the merely human.
Even the style of Mann, somewhat slow in pace and at times
