---Artist and Artisan

IN Carl Van Vechten's "Peter Whiffle", there is an incidental character, a young dillentante of the American brand so often found in Paris, who has a theory upon which he intends to found the literature of tomorrow. He believes that our life is passed in a world of things, everywhere are things, things. And so having collected catalogues of all descriptions,--of perfumes, automobiles, furniture, cigarettes,--with the aid of a few characters he will piece together this data, and that will be the great novel.

Now Thomas Mann has been hailed far and wide as the creator of a new literary genre, as the consummate portrait painter of the modern world. Yet he seems to have done no more than to refine and elaborate this theory of a world of material objects. In the selection of a background for the great narrative painting which is "Magic Mountain", Herr Mann has displayed considerable cleverness. He has chosen an Alpine tuberculosis santorium, where life can be studied in simplicity without the usual consequent sacrifice of sophistication.

To this place comes Hans Pastoy on a visit of three weeks to his cousin Joachim, who has been a patient for some months. Pastoy is a very ordinary person, a member of an ancient Hamburg family of merchants, himself about to enter the ship-building industry. His cousin had been in training for an army career. Both careers promise to be very dull.

But Mann's interest is not in personalities or in noble characters. It is in the hidden forces of life which work despite men. From the moment of Pastoy's arrival, we are aware of an unusual atmosphere, of a certain tension and grimness. One of the first things which is pointed out to him is the road down which are brought, on sleighs, the bodies of the dead.

It takes Mann many pages to describe the three weeks stay. During that time an immense change comes over Hans Pastoy, a change that is gradual, from within, organic. He falls into the life of the sanatorium. He notices that in this place of absolute relaxation the hours are empty and become as nothing, and that the patients begin to think in terms of days, then weeks, finally, months, and years. Also there is a gradual corporalization of the individual: he begins to think of nothing but his bodily state, his temperature, his meals, his senses. Up here love is not the sweet, soft amusement and convention that it is down in the flat lands. It is a fierce elemental passion which absorbs once whole being, which is too awful to be spoken of either jokingly or even as a matter of serious conversation. He experiences this immediately in his desire for Clavadia Chanchat, an exotic, purely, animalistic woman at the "better Russian Table."

The ratified atmosphere which is "good against the disease" is also "good for the disease" and brings to the surface the latent weakness of his lungs. He becomes a regular patient and gives up the idea of an immediate return to the world below. From there on the terrible forces set in motion are carried to their ultimate conclusion.

Hans Pastoy becomes meditative and sympathetic. He comes to respect death. The approach is thoroughly naturalistic and pages are filled with physiological explanations. They are very illuminating but are carried to such extremes that in the end they become tedious and sometimes are in bad taste, even silly: "Something warm and tender clasped him round the back of his neck; melted with desire and awe, he laid his hands upon the flesh of her upper arms., where the fine-grained skin over the bicepts came to his sense so heavenly cool; and upon his lips he felt the moist clinging of her kiss."

This, however, is not all. Herr Mann wishes to picture modern life as well as life in general. Lengthy talks and debates upon contemporary social and philosophic problems of the day immediately before the war are carried on by various patients, in particular the Italian humanitarian, Ludovico Settembrini, the clever Jesuit, Naptha, and the aristocratic Pieter Peeperkorn. These philosophisings may be realistic in that they are mediocre but certainly they are mediocre but certainly they are tiresome reading.

The task which Herr Mann has set himself, he has carried through with ability and perserverance, never once falling below his high standard of completeness and accuracy. He has brought before our immediate notice and in vivid coulours the tremendous elemental forces of natural life. No one who has read this book can forget the awful certainty that is death; man is a combination, as Plato said, of being and not being.

But in the end, Mann's chief characteristic stands in his own path. He has carried local colour to its reductio ad absurdam. The significance of the theme is lost in pages and pages of interesting but unnecessary detail. Herr Mann is probably assured of literary immortality. But it is sad that he should survive, not as a great mind, not as a great artist, but as a source-book for future historians.