86
PARTISAN REVIEW
This was not a new vision for Thomas Mann . The wonderful
idealization, this hope for a life of beauty, peace , and gracious
respect is evocative of Hans Castorp's glorious "Snow" dream, which
forms the climax of
The Magic Mountain .
There Castorp envisions a
sun-drenched bay on the littoral of a classical sea embraced by tree–
clad mountains and peopled by beautiful young creatures who
played, ate , and worked with exquisite grace and courtesy . They
danced, made music, laughed, and loved in a tranquil, polite, good–
natured discourse that captivated Thomas Mann's hero and took his
breath away:
"Oh , lovely, lovely," Hans Castorp breathed . "How joyous
and winning they are , how fresh and healthy, happy and clever
they look! It is not alone the outward form, they seem to be wise
and gentle through and through. That is what makes me in love
with them, the spirit that speaks out of them, the sense, I might
almost say, in which they live and play together. " By which he
meant the friendliness, the mutual courteous regard these
children of the sun showed to each other, a calm, reciprocal
reverence veiled in smiles, manifested almost imperceptibly, and
yet possessing them all by the power of sense association and in–
grained idea. A dignity, even a gravity, was held , as it were, in
solution in their lightest mood, perceptible only as an ineffable
spiritual influence, a high seriousness without austerity, a rea–
soned goodness conditioning every act.
Mann's hero discovers what the "children of the sun" knew–
that behind the courteous, enlightened culture he saw was intimate
knowledge of "the other half of the story, the other side" - aggres–
sion, destruction, and death . In the "Snow" dream Castorp sees can–
nibalism and bloody infant sacrifice in the dark temple. Mann's
message is a Nietzschean and a superbly psychoanalytical in–
sight - that friendly, enlightened human intercourse presumes a per–
sonal familiarity and ease with the darker, hostile , antisocial drives,
impulses, and wishes. This was the secret to the glory of Attic
culture , according to Nietzsche. In Mann's presentation it is the
psychoanalytic lesson of the new humanism, which would bear
Western civilization away from the impasse of the barbarism of the
mid-1930s .
The world looked immeasurably bleaker to a liberal humanist
in 1938 than it need appear to us today. And if that observer was a
resident of an Austria surrounded by the apparently ascendant
