What We Hope from Thomas Mann

areuncrownedsovereignsof the spirit. Voltaire was such a king, and after him Goethe, Victor Hugo, Tolstoy. "The monarchy of wit" is the most substantial of all; few scholars could tell offhand who was rector, bishop or provost of Paris under Villon; and by the side of Tolstoy, the tsars who strutted in his lifetime are shadows. Yet this eminence is elusive; it is the miraculous component of antagonistic forces. The King of Humane Letters is not the rebel or the pioneer. He is not permitted to voyage through strange seas of thought alone. But neither can he be King Log, inert in contented conformity. He must win the respect of the artists and the acclaim of the untutored. Above the strife, he is a vital part of the strife; timeless, he is a living force in the events of the day. No rootless cosmopolitan is eligible, yet the chosen ruler must spurn and transcend the petty "sacred egoism" of his tribe. He must be of this earth, wise in his generation, a shrewd, capable, sociable man; yet he must live also on a different plane: he is fated to be, halfconsciously, a legend, a symbol, a myth. Such is the greatness that the times have thrust upon Thomas Mann; it cannot crush his own inherent greatness. Zola, Wells, Bernard Shaw, deliberately worked for mastership not unworthily, yet the artists in them suffered from the strain. Anatole France submitted to his elevation, with a rueful deprecatory smile; and posterity smiled in return, with a touch of irony and