Doctor Faustus by Thomas Mann Read Free Book Online Page A

delighted without inquiring after its nature and cause. Even the eight-or nine-year-old Adrian probably did not notice. Or did the short laugh, more mocking than surprised, which he gave when the last “Ding-dong” faded on the air and which I came later to know so well—did it mean that he saw through the device of these little songs, which quite simply consists in that the beginning of the melody subsequently forms the second voice and that the third can serve both as bass? None of us was aware that here, led by a stable-girl, we were moving on a plane of musical culture already relatively very high, in a realm of imitative polyphony, which the fifteenth century had had to discover in order to give us pleasure. But when I think back at Adrian’s laugh, I find in retrospect that it did have in it something of knowledge and mocking initiate sense. He kept it as he grew up; I often heard it, sitting with him in theatre or concert-hall, when he was struck by some artful trick, some ingenious device within the musical structure, noticed only by the few; or by some fine psychological allusion in the dialogue of a drama. In the beginning it was unsuitable for his years, being just as a grown person would have laughed: a slight expulsion of air from nose and mouth, with a toss of the head at the same time, short, cool, yes, contemptuous, or at most as though he would say: “Good, that; droll, curious, amusing!” But his eyes were taking it in, their gaze was afar and strange, and their darkness, metal—sprinkled, had put on a deeper shade.

CHAPTER V
    T he chapter just finished is also, for my taste, much too extended. It would seem only too advisable to inquire how the reader’s patience is holding out. To myself, of course every word I write is of burning interest; but what care must I take not to see this as a guarantee of the sympathy of the detached reader! And certainly I must not forget that I am writing for posterity; not for the moment, nor for readers who as yet know nothing of Leverkühn and so cannot long to know more about him. What I do is to prepare these pages for a time when the conditions for public interest will be quite different, and certainly much more favourable; when curiosity about the details of so thrilling an existence, however well or ill presented, will be more eager and less fastidious.
    That time will come. Our prison, so wide and yet so narrow, so suffocatingly full of foul air, will some day open. I mean when the war now raging will have found, one way or the other, its end—and how I shudder at this “one way or the other,” both for myself and for the awful impasse into which fate has crowded the German soul! For I have in mind only one of the two alternatives: only with this one do I reckon, counting upon it against my conscience as a German citizen. The never-ending public instruction has impressed on us in all its horrors the crushing consequences of a German defeat; we cannot help fearing it more than anything else in the world. And yet there is something else—some of us fear it at moments which seem to us criminal, but others quite frankly and steadily—something we fear more than German defeat, and that is German victory. I scarcely dare ask myself to which of these groups I belong. Perhaps to still a third, in which one yearns indeed, steadily and consciously, for defeat, yet also with perpetual torments of conscience. My wishes and hopes must oppose the triumph of German arms, because in it the work of my friend would be buried, a ban would rest upon it for perhaps a hundred years, it would be forgotten, would miss its own age and only in a later one receive historic honour. That is the special motivation of my criminal attitude; I share it with a scattered number of men who can easily be counted on the fingers of my two hands. But my mental state is only a variant of that which, aside from cases of ordinary self-interest or extraordinary stupidity, has become the destiny of