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THE DIALECTICAL HUMANISM OF THOMAS MANN A. F. B. CLARK But natur~ is not spirit; in fact this antithesis is, J should say, the greatest o( all antitheses. ER"ortl~ss nature-that is crude. Effortless spirit is without root or substance . A lofty encounter of nature and spirit as they mutually yearn towards each other, that is man. THOMAS MANN (in Goethe and Tolstoy), THE situation.in which Thomas Mann finds himself to-day is almost unbelievably symbolical of his.whole career, tempera..: ment, and ach_ievement. The man who ·was proclaimed in his youth the poet of decadence and who confessed his own "sympathy with disease and death," has in the evening of his life become an aCtivist and is prophesying on public platforms "the coming triumph of democracy;" the author of the Reflections of a NonPolitical Man, for whom his embattled Fatherland appeared as the champion of a personal, spiritual culture against the hostile, sbcialized civilization of the Entente, is now attributing the enslavement of his people to their fatal indifference to political questions; the one-time ·creator of the Buddenbrooks, the family which declined in proportion as it became intellectualized and ceased "to think with its blood" (in Hitlerian phrase), is now disengaging from the Biblical block of marble a Joseph who represents a synthesis of spirit and nature. But to anyone who knows his Thomas Mann all this implies no violent· conversion. Pope's "Sporus" was described as being " himself one vile anti'thesis." J{ we substitute "endless" for "vile," the phrase sums up Thomas Mann perfectly. He is, perhaps, the most "dialectical'1 in tern.: perament of aJI imaginative writers-and, as such, perfectly representative of the nation that produced Hegel. This applies to his art as well as to his thought. Were there ever novels so naturalistic in their methods of description, characterization, and dialogue, yet Iii: with such an underglow of symbolism and poetic suggestion? Was an author ever .so emotionally absorbed in his characters, yet so ironically ·detached from them? Was subject-matter ever so morbiq and repulsive, yet treatment and atmosphere so instinctively refined and humane? Was intellectual weightiness ever relieved 85 86 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY by such all-pervading humour and wit? Did novels ever so combine timeliness with timelessness? The importance of Thomas Mann has dawned but slowly on the non-Germanic world. Not till 1916 was any work of his translated into English, when Royal Highness appeared in London; then in 1923 a nation of dog-fanciers was made acquainted with his minor work, Master and Dog. Only in 1924-almost a quarter of a century after its publication in Germany-did Buddenbrooks appear in the first of Mrs Lowe-Porter's superb series of translations." ~ven yet, not all of Mann's miscellaneous writings are available to English readers, and one cannot avoid the feeling that it is the distinguished German emigre and anti-Nazi propagandist who looms in the public eye rather than the author of The Magic Mountain and Joseph and His Brethren. Most competent critics are now agreed, however, that in Thomas Mann we have the greatest literary artist of our time; certainly since the deaths of Hardy and Conrad, France and Proust, it would be difficult to set up any rival to him in the Western world, merely as a master of language and of the art of fiction. This aspect of him I have no desire to neglect, but I am even more concerned to call attention to his ideology, for this is both a stumbling-block to his foreign readers, less accustomed than Germans to associate metaphysics with fiction, and yet an integral ·part of the texture of the fiction itself, not- as in the case of most inteHectual novelists-a mere superimposed commentary. Moreover, I believe that the evolution of Mann's thought is most interesting and significant to study in connection with a movement that created quite a stir in America some years ago and which should not be assumed to have lost all its impetus yet-the New Humanism. It will be recalled that the New Humanists were leading a crusade against "naturalism," the worship of...

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