Magic Mountains

ESSAYS OF THREE DECADES (472 pp.)--Thomas Mann, translated by H. T. Lowe-Porter--Knopf ($4).

When Thomas Mann's first great novel, Buddenbrooks, was published in 1901, there still lived in Germany a nonagenarian schoolteacher who had talked not only with young Leo Tolstoy, but with old Goethe himself. Mann, who has published 36 books in his 72 years of life, cites this old schoolteacher as the 20th Century's last physical link with the great world of Goethe, Beethoven, Mozart. But he does not suggest that that world's principal literary descendant today is Thomas Mann himself.

In these 16 profound and erudite essays (which are now collected in book form for the first time), readers will find themselves standing at the latter end of a span that covers 200 years of intellectual and social development, and stems from cultural traditions as old as the Renaissance.

Austere Symbol. Half the subjects of Mann's essays are figures who are known to most Americans (Goethe, Tolstoy, Wagner, Cervantes, Schopenhauer, Freud); the others are likely to interest only a specializing minority. But there is no basic difference in Essayist Mann's approach to any one of them--and it is this constancy that unites them in one volume like assorted vegetables in one string bag.

"Art," says Mann, in one of his ecstatic outbursts, "is the most beautiful, austerest, blithest, most sacred symbol of all supra-reasonable human striving for ... truth and fullness" but it is also "only one humanistic discipline among others; all of them, philosophy, jurisprudence, medicine, theology, even the natural sciences and technology . . . are only variations ... of one and the same high and interesting theme--man."

In estimating the great men of his traditional past, Mann adopts the rare criterion that is characteristic both of himself and of the humane tradition: "Ironic reserve on the subject of ultimate values . . . that irony which glances at both sides . . . and is in no great haste to take sides and come to decisions; guided as it is by the surmise that in ... matters of humanity, every decision may prove premature."

Ardor & Judgment. It is Mann's tolerant, middle-of-the-road approach to man that has infuriated extremists of Right and Left, who have denounced him as a prominent but typical bourgeois. But to Mann, this insult is a compliment, because he believes that it was precisely the bourgeois soil of the 18th and 19th Centuries that nourished the traditions he most admires. Goethe, a dutiful privy councillor of Saxe-Weimar as well as a world poet; Tolstoy, a schoolteaching aristocrat who tried to look like a simple peasant--these men were cradled by the "bourgeois ideal of individual human universality."

When Mann writes in this way of Goethe and Tolstoy, he is not arguing that they simply and naturally kept to the middle of the road. On the contrary, he sees them as men who spent most of their lives and will power struggling to discipline passionate "animal" qualities. Out of this unresolved but "lofty encounter of nature and spirit" came the synthesis most admired by Mann--a harmonious and exalted mixture of primitive ardor and civilized judgment.

Urge & Inspiration. It is this struggle for harmony that Mann makes the center of most of these essays. From Schopenhauer, Mann first learned the nature of the "frightfully radical duality" of "brains and genitals," of "the Will and the Intellect."

In most great men, this struggle raged all the way from the sublime to the ridiculous. Tolstoy, for example (a child of nature whose animal passions filled his novels with "rich streams of ... creative primeval lustiness and health"), fought his passions until he believed he had converted himself from a lecherous, iconoclastic youth into an apostolic, vegetarian writer of Christian tracts ("I am ashamed to speak of my disgusting body," he said). But a rabbit had only to jump up under his feet to make him let out a hunter's bloodthirsty yell. One evening, out of sheer exuberance of animal spirits, the "elderly prophet" sprang onto his father-in-law's shoulders and perched there grinning. "He probably jumped down again at once," says Author Mann gravely, "but--it gives one an uncanny feeling. . . ."

Angel & Devil. "Out of one of his eyes," said a contemporary, of Goethe, "looks an angel, out of the other a devil." In Goethe, the elements of passion and discipline were so bafflingly mixed that he could reach the hearts and minds of millions as a poet* and yet, as government official, callously confirm the death sentence of a child-mother convicted of infanticide. "I am not the first," says Mann, "to find [this] almost as shattering as the whole of Faust."

In Composer Richard Wagner, the contradictory elements became part of an even greater tragedy. Wagner, says Mann, was a "voluptuary" whose battle against his own lavish, romantic sensuality was a lost cause from the start, and whose passionate fairy tales suffered the horrible fate of being engorged in a "beetle-browed about-face toward dictatorship and terror." Yet Wagner, too, Mann insists, was an idealist of "the epoch of bourgeois culture," a "man of the people who all his life long . . . repudiated power and money, violence and war." Nazi use of Wagner's "folk and sword and Nordic heroics," says Thomas Mann, "are but unworthy plunderings from the Wagnerian vocabulary. . . . German Spirit was everything to Wagner, German State nothing."

"If man," Tolstoy exclaimed, "had only once learned not to judge and think so sharply and decisively, and not always to give answers to questions which are only put in order that they may remain forever questions!" Thomas Mann echoes him: "Even at the risk of being called vacillating, I hold to my policy of the free hand [in a period] which has . . . taken up a position of reaction against classic rationalism and intellectualism." In place of decisive answers, readers of these essays will find a series of rich, undogmatic examinations that rank with the finest of their day.

*"[Goethe] makes things easy for himself," Author Mann once heard a "benighted" German say during a performance of Faust: "he just strings quotations together."

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