Authors: Thomas Mann
Hab’ ja doch nichts begangen Dass ich Menschen sollte scheu’n.
These words, and the following:
Welch ein torichtes Verlangen Treibt mich in die Wüstenei’n?
I have heard him speak to himself, indicating the musical phrasing, and to my unforgettable amazement I saw the tears spring to his eyes.
Of course his instrumental writing suffered from a lack of experience through actual hearing and Kretschmar set himself to remedy the defect. In the Michaelmas and Christmas holidays they went (with Uncle Niko’s permission) to operas and concerts in near-by cities: Merseburg, Erfurt, even Weimar, in order that he might realize in actual sound what he had received in the abstract and seen at most on paper. Thus he could take in the childlike solemnity and esoteric mystery of
The Magic Flute
, the formidable charm of
Figaro
, the daemony of the low clarinets in Weber’s glorious transmuted operetta
Der Freischutz
; similar figures of painful and sombre solitude like those of
Hans Heiling
and
The Flying Dutchman
; finally the lofty humanity and brotherhood of
Fidelio
, with the great Overture in C, played before the final scene. This last, of course, was the most impressive, the most absorbing, of all that his young receptive mind came in contact with. For days after that evening he kept the score of No. 3 by him and read it constantly.
“My friend,” said he, “probably they haven’t been waiting for me to say so; but that is a perfect piece of music. Classicism—yes, it isn’t sophisticated at all, but it is great. I don’t say:
for
it is great, because there is such a thing as sophisticated greatness; but this is at bottom much more intimate. Tell me, what do you think about greatness? I find there is something uncomfortable about facing it eye to eye, it is a test of courage—can one really look it in the eye? You can’t stand it, you give way. Let me tell you, I incline more and more to the admission that there is something very odd indeed about this music of yours. A manifestation of the highest energy—not at all abstract, but without an object, energy in a void, in pure ether-where else in the universe does such a thing appear? We Germans have taken over from philosophy the expression ‘in itself,’ we use it every day without much idea of the metaphysical. But here you have it, such music is energy itself, yet not as idea, rather in its actuality. I call your attention to the fact that that is almost the definition of God.
Imitatio Dei
—I am surprised that it is not forbidden. Perhaps it is. Anyhow that is a very nice pointin more than one sense of the word. Look: the most powerful, most varied, most dramatic succession of events and activities, but only in time, consisting only of time articulated, rilled up, organized—and all at once almost thrust into the concrete exigencies of the plot by the repeated trumpet-signals from without. All that is most elegantly and grandly conceived, kept witty and rather objective, even in the high spots—neither scintillating nor all too splendid, nor even very exciting in colour, only just masterly beyond words. How all that is brought in and transformed and put before you, how one theme is led up to and another left behind, taken apart; yet in the process something new is getting ready, so that there is no empty or feeble passage; how flexibly the rhythm changes, a climax approaches, takes in tributaries from all sides, swells like a rising torrent, bursts out in roaring triumph, triumph itself, triumph ‘in and for itself’—I do not like to call it beautiful, the word ‘beauty’ has always been half offensive to me, it has such a silly face, and people feel wanton and corrupt when they say it. But it is good, good in the extreme, it could not be better, perhaps it ought not to be better…”
Thus Adrian. It was a way of talking that in its mixture of intellectual self-criticism and slight feverishness affected me as indescribably moving. Moving because he felt the feverishness in it and found it offensive, was unpleasantly aware of the tremble in his still boyishly thin voice and turned away, flushing.
A great advance in musical knowledge and enthusiastic participation took place at that time in his life, only to get no further for years—at least to all appearance.
CHAPTER X
D
uring his last year at school, in the highest form, Leverkühn in addition to everything else began the study of Hebrew, which was not obligatory and which I did not pursue. Thus he betrayed the direction of his plans for a profession: it “turned out” (I purposely repeat the expression I used to describe the moment when by a chance word he betrayed his religious inner life), it turned out that he intended to study theology. The approach of the final examinations demanded a decision, the election of a faculty, and he declared his choice: declared it in answer to his uncle, who raised his brows and said “Bravo!”—declared it of his own accord to his parents at Buchel, who received the news even better pleased; and had already told me earlier, confessing at the same time that he did not envisage his choice as preparation for taking a parish and assuming a cure of souls, but as an academic career.
That should have been a kind of reassurance to me; indeed, it was that, for it went against me to imagine him as a candidate for the office of preacher or pastor, or even as councillor of the consistory or other high office. If only he had been a Catholic, as we were! His easily imaginable progress up the stages of the hierarchy, to a prince of the Church, would have seemed to me a happier, more fitting prospect. But the very resolve was itself something of a shock and I think I changed colour when he told me. Why? I could hardly have said what he should else have chosen. Actually, to me there was nothing good enough for him; that is, the civilian, empirical side of any calling did not seem to me worthy of him, and I should have looked round in vain for another in the practical, professional performance of which I could properly imagine him. The ambition I cherished on his account was absolute. And yet a shudder went through me when I divined—divined very clearly—that he had made his choice out of arrogance.
We had on occasion agreed, of course, or more correctly we had both espoused the general view, that philosophy was the queen of the sciences. Among them, we had affirmed, she took a place like that of the organ among instruments: she afforded a survey; she combined them intellectually, she ordered and refined the issues of all the fields of research into a universal picture, an overriding and decisive synthesis comprehending the meaning of life, a scrutinizing determination of man’s place in the cosmos. My consideration of my friend’s future, my thoughts about a “profession” for him, had always led me to similar conclusions. The many-sidedness of his activities, while they made me anxious for his health, his thirst for experience, accompanied as it was by a critical attitude, justified such dreams. The most universal field, the life of a masterly polyhistor and philosopher seemed to me just right for him—and further my powers of imagination had not brought me. Now I was to learn that he on his side had privately gone much further. Without giving a sign—for he expressed his decision in very quiet, unassuming words—he had outbid and put to shame the ambitions of his friend for him.
But there is, if you like, a discipline in which Queen Philosophy becomes the servant, the ancillary science, academically speaking a subsidiary branch of another; and that other is theology. Where love of wisdom lifts itself to contemplation of the highest essence, the source of being, the study of God and the things of God, there, one might say, is the peak of scientific dignity, the highest and noblest sphere of knowledge, the apex of all thinking; to the inspired intellect its most exalted goal is here set. The most exalted because here the profane sciences, for instance my own, philology, as well as history and the rest, become a mere tool for the service of knowledge of the divine—and again, the goal to be pursued in the profoundest humility, because in the words of the Scriptures it is “higher than all reason” and the human spirit thereby enters into a more pious, trusting bond than that which any other of the learned professions lays upon him.
This went through my mind when Adrian told me of his decision. If he had made it out of an instinct of spiritual self-discipline, out of the wish to hedge in by a religious profession that cool and ubiquitous intellect of his, which grasped everything so easily and was so spoilt by its own superiority—then I should have agreed. It would not only have tranquillized my indefinite concern, always present, albeit silently; and moreover it would have touched me deeply, for the
sacrificium intellectus
, which of necessity contemplation and knowledge of the other world carries with it, must be esteemed the more highly, the more powerful the intellect that makes it. But I did not at bottom believe in my friend’s humility. I believed in his pride, of which for my part I was proud too, and could not really doubt that it was the source of his decision. Hence the mixture of joy and concern, the grounds of the shudder that went through me.
He saw my conflict and seemed to ascribe it to a third person, his music-teacher.
“You mean, of course, Kretschmar will be disappointed,” he said. “Naturally, I know he would have liked me to give myself to Polyhymnia. Strange, people always want you to follow the same path they do. One can’t please everybody. But I’ll remind him that through liturgy and her history music plays very strongly into the theological; more practically and artistically, indeed, than into the mathematical and physical, or into acoustics.”
In announcing his purpose of saying as much to Kretschmar, he was really, as I well knew, saying it to me; and when I was alone I thought of it again and again. Certainly, in relation to theology and the service of God, music—of course like all the arts, and also the secular sciences, but music in particular—took on an ancillary, auxiliary character. The thought was associated in my mind with certain discussions which we had had on the destiny of art, on the one hand very conducive, but on the other sadly hampering; we referred to her emancipation from cult, her cultural secularization. It was all quite clear to me: his choice had been influenced by his personal desire and his professional prospects, the wish to reduce music again to the position that once, in times he considered happier, she had held in the union of cults. Like the profane disciplines, so likewise music: he would see them all beneath the sphere to which he would dedicate himself as adept. And I got a strange vision, a sort of allegory of his point of view: it was like a baroque painting, an enormous altarpiece, whereon all the arts and sciences in humble and votive posture paid their devotions to theology enthroned.
Adrian laughed loudly at my vision when I told him about it. He was in high spirits at that time, much inclined to jest—and quite understandably. The moment of taking flight, when freedom dawns, when the school gate shuts behind us, the shell breaks, the chrysalis bursts, the world lies open—is it not the happiest, or the most exciting, certainly the most expectant in all our lives? Through his musical excursions with Wendell Kretschmar to the larger near-by cities, Adrian had tasted the outer world a few times; now Kaisersaschern, the place of witches and strangelings, of the instrument warehouse and the imperial tomb in the Cathedral, would finally loose its hold on him, and only on visits would he walk its streets, smiling like one aware of other spheres.
Was that true? Had Kaisersaschern ever released him? Did he not take her with him wherever he went and was he not conditioned by her whenever he thought to decide? What is freedom? Only the neutral is free. The characteristic is never free, it is stamped, determined, bound. Was it not “Kaisersaschern” that spoke in my friend’s decision to study theology? Adrian Leverkühn and Kaisersaschern: obviously the two together yielded theology. I asked myself further what else I had expected. He devoted himself later to musical composition. But if it was very bold music he wrote, was it after all “free” music, world music? That it was not. It was the music of one who never escaped; it was, into its most mysterious, inspired, bizarre convolution, in every hollow breath and echo it gave out, characteristic music, music of Kaisersaschern.
He was, I said, in high spirits at that time—and why not? Dispensed from oral examination on the basis of the maturity of his written work, he had taken leave of his teachers, with thanks for all they had done; while on their side respect for the profession he had chosen repressed the private annoyance they had always felt at his condescending facility. Even so, the worthy director of the School of the Brethren of the Common Life, a Pomeranian named Dr. Stoientin, who had been Adrian’s master in Greek, Middle High German, and Hebrew, did not fail at their private leave—taking to utter a word of warning.
“
Vale
,” he said, “and God be with you, Leverkühn.—The parting blessing comes from my heart, and whether you are of that opinion or not, it seems to me you may need it. You are a person richly gifted and you know it—as why should you not? You know too that He above, from whom all comes, gave you your gifts, for to Him you now offer them. You are right: natural merits are God’s merits in us, not our own. It is His foe who, fallen through pride himself, would teach us to forget. He is evil to entertain, a roaring lion who goes about seeking whom he may devour. You are among those who have reason to be on guard against his wiles. It is a compliment I am paying you, or rather to what you are from God. Be it in humility, my friend, not in defiance or with boasting; and be ever mindful that self-satisfaction is like a falling away and unthankfulness against the Giver of all mercies!”
Thus our honest schoolmaster, under whom later I served as teacher in the gymnasium. Adrian reported it smiling, on one of the many walks we took through field and forest, in that Eastertide at Buchel. For he spent several weeks of freedom there after leaving school, and his good parents invited me to bear him company. Well I remember the talks we had as we strolled, about Stoientin’s warning, especially about the expression “native merit” which he had used in his farewell. Adrian pointed out that he took it from Goethe, who enjoyed using it, and also “inborn merits,” seeking in the paradoxical combination to divorce from the word “merit” its moral character, and, conversely, to exalt the natural and inborn to a position of extra-moral, aristocratic desert. That was why he was against the claims of modesty which were always put forward by those disadvantaged by nature, and declared that “Only good-for-nothings are modest.” But Director Stoientin had used Goethe’s words more in Schiller’s sense, to whom everything had depended on freedom, and who therefore distinguished in a moral sense between talent and personal merit, sharply differentiating merit and fortune, which Goethe considered to be inextricably interwoven. The director followed Schiller, when he called nature God and native talent the merit of God in us, which we were to wear in humility.