reserve of the
skeptical man of the world, who knows how to weave in everywhere
the comments of a shrewd philosophy of life, who bridles passion with
strict self-control, and in the representation of the most tempestuous
crises maintains sure mastery over expression and form. The writer
himself may share with his creations their longing for fresh elemental
power; but he is endowed with far too much of the traditional culture
of his caste ever to allow himself any obstreperous accents. The words
of one of his dramatic figures characterize his own art: "We no longer
know how to underscore. Underscoring is in bad taste. Those people out
there live on underscoring."

Longing for abundant pulsating life, and autumnal renunciation on the
part of a decaying family, are also among the principal motifs in the
work of Thomas Mann. "Life, revealing itself in eternal contrariness to
the spirit and to art--not as a vision of bloody greatness and untamed
beauty, not as something uncommon does it present itself to us uncommon
people. On the contrary, the normal, proper, and lovely is the realm of
our longing, is life in its seductive banality! He is far from being an
artist, whose last and deepest yearning is for the superrefined, the
eccentric and satanical, who knows no longing for the innocent, the
simple and living, for a little friendship, devotion, confidential
familiarity, and human happiness--the furtive and consuming longing for
the raptures of the common place!"

These sentiments of Mann's Tonio Kroeger might animate one of
Keyserling's characters, but Keyserling would never express them in
such impulsive fashion. Mann is much more subjective than Keyserling.
In all the experiences of his characters he is mirrored himself, and
all of his writings make and repeat one and the same confession as the
foundation of his art, the solitude of the artist.

The cleft which separates two worlds is recognizable in his very
parentage. Thomas Mann was born in Luebeck in 1875, the son of a
merchant and senator of the ancient Hanseatic city; his mother is a
Creole from South America. In his elder brother Heinrich Mann, perhaps
a more ingenious, but a less finished writer, of the nervous, ardently
passionate, impressionistic sort, the exotic heritage has tended to
predominate; in Thomas Mann the correctness of the austere Hanseatic
city and her old traditions seems to be the strongest element. Because
he cannot escape the exasperating inc