by Thomas Mann
As for the hieroglyphs which so puzzled him, these were on a middle-sized shell, a mussel from New Caledonia: slightly reddish-brown characters on a white ground. They looked as though they were made with a brush, and round the rim became purely ornamental strokes; but on the larger part of the curved surface their careful complexity had the most distinct look of explanatory remarks. In my recollection they showed strong resemblance to ancient Oriental writings, for instance the old Aramaic ductus. My father had actually brought archaeological works from the not ill-provided town library of Kaisersaschern to give his friend the opportunity for comparison and study. There had been, of course, no result, or only such confusion and absurdity as came to nothing. With a certain melancholy Jonathan admitted it when he showed us the riddling reproduction. “It has turned out to be impossible,” he said, “to get at the meaning of these marks. Unfortunately, my dears, such is the case. They refuse themselves to our understanding, and will, painfully enough, continue to do so. But when I say refuse, that is merely the negative of reveal—and that Nature painted these ciphers, to which we lack the key, merely for ornament on the shell of her creature, nobody can persuade me. Ornament and meaning always run alongside each other; the old writings too served for both ornament and communication. Nobody can tell me that there is nothing communicated here. That it is an inaccessible communication, to plunge into this contradiction, is also a pleasure.”
Did he think, if it were really a case of secret writing, that Nature must command a language born and organized out of her own self? For what man—invented one should she choose, to express herself in? But even as a boy I clearly understood that Nature, outside of the human race, is fundamentally illiterate—that in my eyes is precisely what makes her uncanny.
Yes, Father Leverkühn was a dreamer and speculator, and I have already said that his taste for research—if one can speak of research instead of mere dreamy contemplation—always leaned in a certain direction—namely, the mystical or an intuitive half-mystical, into which, as it seems to me, human thinking in pursuit of Nature is almost of necessity led. But the enterprise of experimenting on Nature, of teasing her into manifestations, “tempting” her, in the sense of laying bare her workings by experiment; that all this had quite close relations with witchcraft, yes, belonged in that realm and was itself a work of the “Tempter,” such was the conviction of earlier epochs. It was a decent conviction, if you were to ask me. I should like to know with what eyes one would have looked on the man from Wittenberg who, as we heard from Jonathan, a hundred and some years before had invented the experiment of visible music, which we were sometimes permitted to see. To the small amount of physical apparatus which Adrian’s father had at his command belonged a round glass plate, resting only on a peg in the centre and revolving freely. On this glass plate the miracle took place. It was strewn with fine sand, and Jonathan, by means of an old cello bow which he drew up and down the edge from top to bottom made it vibrate, and according to its motion the excited sand grouped and arranged itself in astonishingly precise and varied figures and arabesques. This visible acoustic, wherein the simple and the mysterious, law and miracle, so charmingly mingled, pleased us lads exceedingly; we often asked to see it, and not least to give the experimenter pleasure.
A similar pleasure he found in ice crystals; and on winter days when the little peasant windows of the farmhouse were frosted, he would be absorbed in their structure for half an hour, looking at them both with the naked eye and with his magnifying glass. I should like to say that all that would have been good and belonging to the regular order of things if only the phenomena had kept to a symmetrical pattern, as they ought, strictly regular and mathematical. But that they did not. Impudently, deceptively, they imitated the vegetable kingdom: most prettily of all, fern fronds, grasses, the calyxes and corollas of flowers. To the utmost of their icy ability they dabbled in the organic; and that Jonathan could never get over, nor cease his more or less disapproving but also admiring shakes of the head. Did, he inquired, these phantasmagorias prefigure the forms of the vegetable world, or did they imitate them? Neither one nor the other, he answered himself; they were parallel phenomena. Creatively dreaming Nature dreamed here and there the. same dream: if there could be a thought of imitation, then surely it was reciprocal. Should one put down the actual children of the field as the pattern because they possessed organic actuality, while the snow crystals were mere show? But their appearance was the result of no smaller complexity of the action of matter than was that of the plants. If I understood my host aright, then what occupied him was the essential unity of animate and so-called inanimate nature, it was the thought that we sin against the latter when we draw too hard and fast a line between the two fields, since in reality it is pervious and there is no elementary capacity which is reserved entirely to the living creature and which the biologist could not also study on an inanimate subject.
We learned how bewilderingly the two kingdoms mimic each other, when Father Leverkühn showed us the “devouring drop,” more than once giving it its meal before our eyes. A drop of any kind, paraffin, volatile oil—I no longer feel sure what it was, it may have been chloroform—a drop, I say, is not animal, not even of the most primitive type, not even an amoeba; one does not suppose that it feels appetite, seizes nourishment, keeps what suits it, rejects what does not. But just this was what our drop did. It hung by itself in a glass of water, wherein Jonathan had sub merged it, probably with a dropper. What he did was as follows: he took a tiny glass stick, just a glass thread, which he had coated with shellac, between the prongs of a little pair of pincers and brought it close to the drop. That was all he did; the rest the drop did itself. It threw up on its surface a little protuberance, something like a mount of conception, through which it took the stick into itself, lengthwise. At the same time it got longer, became pear-shaped in order to get its prey all in, so that it should not stick out beyond, and began, I give you my word for it, gradually growing round again, first by taking on an egg-shape, to eat off the shellac and distribute it in its body. This done, and returned to its round shape, it moved the stick, licked clean, crosswise to its own surface and ejected it into the water.
I cannot say that I enjoyed seeing this, but I confess that I was fascinated, and Adrian probably was too, though he was always sorely tempted to laugh at such displays and suppressed his laughter only out of respect for his father’s gravity. The devouring drop might conceivably strike one as funny. But no one, certainly not myself, could have laughed at certain other phenomena, “natural,” yet incredible and uncanny, displayed by Father Lever-kiihn. He had succeeded in making a most singular culture; I shall never forget the sight. The vessel of crystallization was three-quarters full of slightly muddy water—that is, dilute water-glass—and from the sandy bottom there strove upwards a grotesque little landscape of variously coloured growths: a confused vegetation of blue, green, and brown shoots which reminded one of algaj, mushrooms, attached polyps, also moss, then mussels, fruit pods, little trees or twigs from trees, here and there of limbs. It was the most remarkable sight I ever saw, and remarkable not so much for its appearance, strange and amazing though that was, as on account of its profoundly melancholy nature. For when Father Leverkühn asked us what we thought of it and we timidly answered him that they might be plants: “No,” he replied, “they are not, they only act that way. But do not think the less of them. Precisely because they do, because they try to as hard as they can, they are worthy of all respect.”
It turned out that these growths were entirely unorganic in their origin; they existed by virtue of chemicals from the apothecary’s shop, the “Blessed Messengers.” Before pouring the water-glass, Jonathan had sprinkled the sand at the bottom with various crystals; if I mistake not potassium chromate and sulphate of copper. From this sowing, as the result of a physical process called “osmotic pressure,” there sprang the pathetic crop for which their producer at once and urgently claimed our sympathy. He showed us that these
pathetic imitations of life were light-seeking, heliotropic, as science calls it. He exposed the aquarium to the sunlight, shading three sides against it, and behold, toward that one pane through which the light fell, thither straightway slanted the whole equivocal kith and kin: mushrooms, phallic polyp-stalks, little trees, algae, half-formed limbs. Indeed, they so yearned after warmth and joy that they actually clung to the pane and stuck fast there.
“And even so they are dead,” said Jonathan, and tears came in his eyes, while Adrian, as of course I saw, was shaken with suppressed laughter.
For my part, I must leave it to the reader’s judgment whether that sort of thing is matter for laughter or tears. But one thing I will say: such weirdnesses are exclusively Nature’s own affair, and particularly of nature arrogantly tempted by man. In the high-minded realms of the humaniora one is safe from such impish phenomena.
CHAPTER IV
Since the foregoing section has swollen out of all conscience, I shall do well to begin a new one, for it is my purpose now to do honour to the image of the mistress of Buchel, Adrian’s dear mother. Gratitude for a happy childhood, in which the good things she gave us to eat played no small part, may add lustre to my picture of her. But truly in all my life I have never seen a more attractive woman than Elsbeth Leverkühn. The reverence with which I speak of her simple, intellectually altogether unassuming person flows from my conviction that the genius of the son owed very much to his mother’s vigour and bloom.
Jonathan Leverkühn’s fine old-German head was always a joy to my eyes; but they rested with no less delight on his wife’s figure, so altogether pleasant it was, so individual and well proportioned. She was born near Apolda, and her type was that brunette one which is sometimes found among us, even in regions where there is no definite ground to suspect Roman blood. The darkness of her colouring, the black hair, the black eyes with their quiet, friendly gaze, might have made me take her for an Italian were it not for a certain sturdiness in the facial structure. It was a rather short oval, this face, with somewhat pointed chin, a not very regular nose, slightly flat and a little tilted, and a tranquil mouth, neither voluptuous nor severe. The hair half covered the ears, and as I grew up it was slowly silvering; it was drawn tightly back, as smooth as glass, and the parting above the brow laid bare the whiteness of the skin beneath. Even so, not always, and so probably unintentionally, some loose strands hung charmingly down in front of the ears. The braid, in our childhood still a massive one, was twined peasant-fashion round the back of the head and on feast-days it might be wound with a gay embroidered ribbon.
City clothes were as little to her liking as to her husband’s: the ladylike did not suit her. On the other hand, the costume of the region, in which we knew her, became her to a marvel: the heavy home-made skirt and a sort of trimmed bodice with a square opening leaving bare the rather short, sturdy neck and the upper part of the breast, where hung a simple gold ornament. The capable brown hands with the wedding ring on the right one were neither coarse nor fastidiously cared for; they had, I would say, something so humanly right and responsible about them that one enjoyed the sight of them, as well as the shapely feet, which stepped out firmly, neither too large nor too small, in the easy, low-heeled shoes and the green or grey woollen stockings which spanned the neat ankles. All this was pleasant indeed. But the finest thing about her was her voice, in register a warm mezzo-soprano, and in speaking, though with a slight Thuringian inflexion, quite extraordinarily winning. I do not say flattering, because the word seems to imply intention. The vocal charm was due to an inherently musical temperament, which, however, remained latent, for Elsbeth never troubled about music, never so to speak “professed” it. She might quite casually strum a few chords on the old guitar that decorated the living-room wall; she might hum this or that snatch of song. But she never committed herself, never actually sang, although I would wager that there was excellent raw material there.
In any case, I have never heard anyone speak more beautifully, though what she said was always of the simplest and most matter-of-fact. And this native, instinctive taste, this harmony, was from the first hour Adrian’s lullaby. To me that means something, it helps to explain the incredible ear which is revealed in his work—even though the objection lies to hand that his brother George enjoyed the same advantage without any influence upon his later life. George looked more like his father too, while Adrian physically resembled the mother—though again there is a discrepancy, for it was Adrian, not George, who inherited the tendency to migraine. But the general habit of my deceased friend, and even many particular traits: the brunette skin, the shape of eye, mouth, and chin, all that came from the mother’s side. The likeness was plain as long as he was smooth-shaven, before he grew the heavy beard. That was only in his latter years; it altered his looks very much. The pitch-black of the mother’s eyes had mingled with the father’s azure blue to a shadowy blue-grey-green iris with little metallic sprinkles and a rust-coloured ring round the pupils. To me it was a moral certainty that the contrast between the eyes of the two parents, the blending of hers into his, was what formed his taste in this respect or rather made it waver. For never, all his life long, could he decide which, the black or the blue, he liked better. Yet always it was the extreme that drew him: the very blue, or else the pitch-black gleam between the lashes.
Frau Elsbeth’s influence on the hands at Buchel—not very numerous save at harvest-time, and then the neighbours came in to help—was of the very best; if I am right, her authority among them was greater than her husband’s. I can still see the figures of some of them; for instance, that of Thomas, the ostler, who used to fetch us from Weissenfels and bring us back: a one-eyed, extraordinarily long and bony man, with a slight hump, on which he used to let little Adrian ride; it was, the Meister often told me later, a most practical and comfortable seat. And I recall the cowgirl Hanne, whose bosoms flapped as she walked and whose bare feet were always caked with dung. She and the boy Adrian had a close friendship, on grounds still to be gone into in detail. Then there was the dairywoman Frau Luder, a widow in a cap. Her face was set in an expression of exaggerated dignity, probably due to her renown as a mistress of the art of making liqueurs and caraway cheese. It was she, if not Elsbeth herself, who took us to the cow-stalls, where the milkmaid crouched on her stool, and under her fingers there ran into our glasses the lukewarm foaming milk, smelling of the good and useful animal that gave it.
All this detail, these memories of our country world of childhood in its simple setting of wood and meadow, pond and hill—I would not dwell upon them but that just they formed the early surroundings of Adrian up to his tenth year. This was his parental home, his native heath, the scene where he and I so often came together. It was the time in which our du was rooted, the time when he too must have called me by my Christian name. I hear it no more, but it is unthinkable that at six or eight years he should not have called me Serenus or simply Seren just as I called him Adri. The date cannot be fixed, but it must certainly have been in our early school-days that he ceased to bestow it on me and used only my last name instead, though it would have seemed to me impossibly harsh to do the same. Thus it was—though I would not have it look as though I wanted to complain. Yet it seemed to me worth mention that I called him Adrian; he on the other hand, when he did not altogether avoid all address, called me Zeitblom.—Let us not dwell on the odd circumstance, which became second nature to me, but drop it and return to Buchel.
His friend, and mine too, was the yard dog, Suso. The bearer of this singular name was a rather mangy setter. When one brought her her food she used to grin across her whole face, but she was by no means good-natured to strangers, and led the unnatural life of a dog chained all day to its kennel and only let free to roam the court at night. Together Adrian and I looked into the filthy huddle in the pigsty and recalled the old wives’ tales we had heard about these muddy sucklings with the furtive white-eyelashed little blue eyes and the fat bodies so like in colour to human
flesh: how these animals did sometimes actually devour small children. We forced our vocal chords to imitate the throaty grunt of their language and watched the rosy snouts of the litter at the dugs of the sow. Together we laughed at the hens behind the wire of the chicken-house: they accompanied their fatuous activities by a dignified gabbling, breaking out only now and then into hysterical squawks. We visited the beehives behind the house, but kept our distance, knowing already the throbbing pain caused by these busy creatures when one of them blundered against your nose and defended itself with its sting.
I remember the kitchen garden and the currant bushes whose laden stems we drew through our lips; the meadow sorrel we nibbled; certain wild-flowers from whose throats we sucked the drop of fine nectar; the acorns we chewed, lying on our backs in the wood; the purple, sun-warmed blackberries we ate from the wayside bushes to quench our childish thirst with their sharp juice. We were children—ah, it is not on my own account but on his that I am moved as I look back, at the thought of his fate, and how from that vale of innocence he was to mount up to inhospitable, yes, awful heights. It was the life of an artist; and because it was given to me, a simple man, to see it all so close by, all the feelings of my soul for human lot and fate were concentrated about this unique specimen of humanity. Thanks to my friendship with Adrian, it stands to me for the pattern of how destiny shapes the soul, for the classic, amazing instance of that which we call becoming, development, evolution—and actually it may be just that. For though the artist may all his life remain closer, not to say truer, to his childhood than the man trained for practical life, although one may say that he, unlike the latter, abides in the dreamy, purely human and playful childlike state, yet his path out of his simple, unaffected beginnings to the undivined later stages of his course is endlessly farther, wilder, more shattering to watch than that of the ordinary citizen. With the latter, too, the thought that he was once a child is not nearly so full of tears.
