men of letters. He, himself, however roundly
resents being labeled a “writer,” and insists
upon considering himself not as an “artist”
at all but only “a good bourgeois drifted by
chance into literature.” To Mann this is no mere
equivocation in terms; rather it represents the
very keynote of his philosophy as revealed in his
works, springing from a deeply held conviction
that the intellectual type is not the ideal
toward which evolution moves, but, instead, the
man-of-action. All of Mann’s writing indeed, from
the epoch-making “Buddenbrooks” of his youth to
“The Magic Mountain,” the masterpiece of his
maturity, constitutes the most elaborate rejection
in literature of the “intellectual” as an unhealthy
growth upon the main body of humanity; but while
this theme dominates Mann’s works, it is only the
scarlet thread in his design, the whole of which
comprises nothing less than the most profound
criticism of the modern world yet vouchsafed by any
novelist.
_This book was set on the linotype in Bodoni,
electrotyped, printed and bound by The Plimpton
Press, Norwood, Mass. The paper was made by S. D.
Warren Co., Boston_