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Ethics of the Artist

Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann. Translated by H. T. Lowe-Porter. Alfred A. Knopf

The Dial, November 1924, 420–422

Although Buddenbrooks was written by Mann in his twenties, it is the work of a writer who, if not mature, quite obviously placed a high value upon maturity as a literary acquisition. While thanks to the solidity of the North German civilization which Mann was depicting, at this early age he had already seen people “placed,” had already seen so many points in the progress of their lives from ambition to success or frustration, that he could plot the entire curve of their careers. This, I take it, is a major aspect of experience. And meditation upon this experience is one aspect of philosophy. Buddenbrooks is rich in both.

Buddenbrooks is the story of a North German merchant family through four generations, developing from a genial, normal stock which enjoyed life and took the good things of life without question, through two generations of growing introversion, where the openness to externals became less of an appetite and more of a moral obligation, finally culminating in the artist whose sensitiveness to outside impressions has “o’erleapt itself and fallen on t’other,” so that he is unable to accept normal everyday life even as a duty, but takes to music and poetry like a drug. This is called the Decay of a Family. Over against this, almost as an artistic necessity, we have the rise of bolder and more unscrupulous merchants, vigorous, good-natured, destroying the older family through necessity rather than malice, as fit for living as Nietzsche’s blond beast, and above all, thick-skinned. The story is pursued patiently, stroke upon stroke, often with a delicate sense of chapter development and transition; and when it is over we have this major form of a march through four generations, a curve as natural as the cycle of a storm, or the incubation of a malady.

There are certain books which are the result of a genre, and these books are understood and appreciated best after we know the aesthetic conditions under which they arose. There are other books (much rarer) which serve to justify a genre, so that the aesthetic conditions are understood and appreciated best after we know the books. Buddenbrooks and Death in Venice fall within the latter category. They are the profound justification of a typical nineteenth-century attitude, where the instability of moral dogma was compensated for by the stress of moralism, specific religion gave way to religiosity, and the physiognomy of God retreated behind the idea of divinity.

In the sharp piece of self-analysis with which Thomas Mann introduces his Betrachtungen Eines Unpolitischen, he speaks of his “conscientiousness—a quality which comprises such an essential element of my writings that one might almost say they consist of nothing else: conscientiousness, an ethical-artistic quality, to which I am indebted for whatever effects I may have gotten.” This conscientiousness has a double manifestation. It is first a “morality of production” which ranks the author among the great technicians of literature. This aspect of his writing culminates in his short novel, Death in Venice, where almost every paragraph contains some particular reward of vigilance, some formal invention, the solution of some literary problem.

The other aspect of his “conscientiousness” is the development of an attitude towards life which is, before everything else, patient, or even cautious. The total body of Mann’s work is the formulation of an ethics: not an ethical system, but an ethical proclivity, a highly complex reception of life through the modes of “Romantik, Nationalismus, Burgerlichkeit, Musik, Pessimismus, Humor.” If I understand Paul Elmer More correctly, I should say that Thomas Mann is a skeptic in Mr. More’s sense of the word. Which is, it seems to me, almost the equivalent to saying that he is fully the artist. For it is in the artist that we find formulations of life (symbolizations) which are as complex, as poised, as life itself. And perhaps what More means by skepticism, Mann means by anti-radicalism: a state of suspense before too easy a simplification. (I say easy, aware that a man may expend a whole life, and an heroic energy of discipline, in the pursuit of a doctrine, and yet have taken the “easier” channel of escape. Prior to this plunge into one direction, there is room for an initial skepticism or anti-radicalism which might deprive said man of precisely this life interest on which he will practice his energy of discipline. Over against the discipline of the soldier or the athlete—the early martyr or the modern business man—there is a discipline of evaluations, a discipline of poise rather than a discipline of projection. This is what I understand by skepticism, or anti-radicalism.)

So Mann is above all “conscientious.” And it was precisely this conscientiousness which kept him from being either a bourgeois or a Bohemian, kept him vacillating between his sympathy for the mediocre, the blunt, the unthinking and his deep understanding of hyperaesthesia. From Goethe, through Nietzsche, he accepts “life” as the basis of values; and yet he also associates the development of the aesthetic sense with the hypertrophy of channels which are useless, even positively inimical, to the purposes of this “life.”

With all this we are now familiar. This type of preoccupation is precisely what the nineteenth century left us as one of its most complex and irritating inheritances. While it is in Mann’s works that the mood is recovered in all its vitality and significance; since his are the sort of books that justify the genre.

However, I have been seeing Buddenbrooks too much in retrospect, too much the way Mann himself looks back upon it in his Betrachtungen Eines Unpolitischen (Mann’s craftsmanship has been rewarded in that he does not have to “renounce” his earlier work—as is the fashion—but deepens it as he proceeds). Before all else, Buddenbrooks is an epic novel (a large canvas with many details and people and single events, all drawn together into one organism).

It includes people who are characters, and others who are characteristic, and others who are types. At times, that is, it focuses upon strict psychological analysis, while at other times it develops caricature with the vivacity of Dickens, although without Dickens’ excesses of sentiment and vulgarities of style. Or again, Mann will centre his faculties on the charting of an event, as for instance the clinical record of a death, which he can carry off with a subtle mixture of emotionalism and technicality. Buddenbrooks (and the English version is an admirably smooth piece of work) is one of the few “epic” novels in which the handling of major proportions has not misled the author into a neglect of line-for-line texture.