Word: manne
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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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...
...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...
...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...
...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...