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Typos — p. 128: healthly [= healthy]


Essays by Thomas Mann

by
Anthony M. Ludovici

The New English Weekly 34, 1948–49, pp. 127–128


- p. 127 -
In this valuable collection of Essays,* fluently rendered by Mrs. H. T. Porter, we are given a distinguished writer's views on some of the greatest men of modern times, from Goethe to Freud, and so well is our interest sustained that, at the end, we wish that there might be a second volume to include the conspicuous omissions of this one. For instance, where are Heine, Nietzsche, even Hegel? L'appetit vient en mangeant.
        Again and again Mann reminds us of how much still remains undated in these giants of the past, though too often our heart is wrung by what seems for ever lost. This applies especially to the chapters on Goethe, much of whose serene philosophy gives us tidings of a world we now no longer know. Mann contrives to shed much new light on some of the less familiar aspects of Faust, and the excellence of the English rendering of the quoted passages, some of them quite long, suggests the question, why does not Mrs. H. T. Lowe-Porter give us a new English version of Goethe's masterpiece?
        There is no doubt about Mann's sincere love and appreciation of his subject in these Goethe pages, and it is understandable. What is less clear, at least to a modern and a foreigner, is his high praise of The Sorrows of Werther. True, a young Englishman is said to have fainted "at the sight of the author of Werther in the flesh." But that was long ago. It is hard to believe that his counterpart would enjoy the book today. And this surely implies one of the few gains that the world has scored since Goethe's time. Mann's estimate of Wahlverwandtschaften seems also a little excessive. On the other hand, the truly wonderful Hermann und Dorothea — Goethe's favourite among his poems — receives but faint praise. It was certainly Goethe's modesty vis-à-vis of Schiller that made him declare, after the enthusiastic reception of this poem by the public, that he felt "like a successful conjurer who had shuffled his cards well." For the reader who comes to this poem for the first time is struck not only with the elevated diction, the simplicity of the theme and the directness of the form, but also, perhaps above all, with the overpowering virtuosity of its torrential speed. Cela coule de source, and the source is sheer overflowing love of the characters portrayed.
        Against Goethe's damaging admission to Schiller, therefore, the reader should have been told that the poem was Goethe's favourite. Also, it seems to me, that with all Mann's sincere appreciation of Goethe, he rather overdoes the subject of Goethe as bourgeois appealing to bourgeois. As Oswald Spengler has pointed out, "the opposite of nobility, according to the code of every true society, is 'vulgar' and not poverty or want of money." Now there is always a trace of the vulgar in the idea of the bourgeois, as we did not need Molière to point out. Goethe, however, was never vulgar. This remains true even if we cannot swear that he was always above sentimentality. Nor does Mann substantiate his claim, in spite of the twenty-six pages he devotes to it.
        The eighty odd pages on Goethe and Tolstoy are full of good things which unfortunately must be passed over. At one point, however, Mann misses an unusually good opportunity of drawing a moral. He says: "Nobility is always natural. People are not ennobled, that is rubbish; they are noble by birth, on the ground of their flesh and blood. Nobility then is physical: on the body and not on the mind all nobility has always laid the greatest stress."
        Later, he speaks of Tolstoy as a man pre-eminently

        * Essays of Three Decades by THOMAS MANN (Secker & Warburg. Demy 8vo. pp. 464. Price 21/- net.)

- p. 128 -
peasant-like, and adds: "Tolstoy's face was humanly speaking ugly, and he suffered greatly on account of it, convinced that there could be little joy in store for a creature with such a broad nose, such thick lips, and small grey eyes."
        Goethe, on the contrary, had noble, prepossessing features which instantly informed the onlooker of his lofty character. Indeed, Mann notes with approval Eckermann's words on viewing Goethe's corpse: "A perfect human being lay in great beauty there before me; and the delight I fell made me forget for a moment that the immortal spirit had forsaken such a frame."
        If, then, nobility is chiefly flesh and blood, how could Goethe have been bourgeois or vulgar?
        Interesting essays follow on Lessing, Kleist, Chamisso, Platen, Storm and Old Fontane. Well worth reading, but they must not detain us now. Much in the next essay on Richard Wagner will surprise and shock fanatical Nietzscheans; but there is justice in Mann's point of view, and the essay stands as a good reply to Nietzsche's two famous attacks on his former friend. Nevertheless, with all his strictures. Mann sometimes gives Nietzsche credit for more than he deserves, For instance, with reference to Freud's "profound investigation into the roots and depths of the mind," he says it "has been in its broadest lines anticipated by Nietzsche." Truth to tell, however, it was Schopenhauer who first anticipated Freud — Schopenhauer, to whom Nietzsche owed many of his brightest psychological Einfälle. Yet, even in the later essay devoted to Schopenhauer, Mann still does not show that he is aware of this. In the still later essay on Freud, Mann declares — on what authority I do not know — that Freud, when he discovered psychoanalysis, knew nothing of either Nietzsche or Schopenhauer. But in this very essay, he repeats the claim for Nietzsche, "scattered throughout whose pages one finds premonitory flashes of truly Freudian insight."
        Since it evidently appears to be little known, it may be as well to indicate here the substance of the remarkable passage in Schopenhauer which, I submit, contains the germ of psychoanalysis. It occurs in the 32nd. Chapter of Vol. II of the main work, and the subject is Madness.
        Schopenhauer points out how reluctantly our mind (consciousness) attends to matters which conflict sharply with our self-esteem, interests, or wishes, and how unwillingly these are seriously examined by our intellect. On the contrary, quite unconsciously, we avoid them or deliberately dismiss them. But in every such effort of the will to prevent the intellect (consciousness) from illuminating what is repulsive to it, lies the danger of madness. No matter how distasteful any awkward fact or idea may be, the intellect (consciousness) should assimilate it — i.e., give it a place in the system composed of our will and the truths concerned with its interests. If this happens, the harm the fact or idea may do is immediately diminished. But, although, this process of assimilation is often both painful and exceedingly protracted, the mind can remain healthly only so long as it is successfully performed in each case. If the resistance to the assimilation of an awkward fact or idea is so powerful that the said process cannot be performed, then the intellect will be wholly at the mercy of certain happenings, because the will cannot endure them, and madness will ensue.
        If we replace the word "madness" in this passage by "neurosis" or "psychosis," we have almost a summary of Freud's doctrine of repressions and their evil consequences. It is curious that it was passed over by the author of these essays.
        But Thomas Mann's admiration of Schopenhauer is obviously deep and sincere. It would have been pleasant to touch upon some of the evidences of this to be found in his tribute to the great sage. But space forbids. At all events, the curiosity of the reader on this point may induce him to procure and read the Essays of Three Decades. He will certainly be amply rewarded for his pains.

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