Excerpt from Thomas Mann, regarding sentiment, the artist, and his art

“Five minutes ago, quite near here, I met a colleague--Adalbert, the short-story writer. ‘God damn the spring!’ he said in his aggressive way. ‘It is and always was the most abominable season of the year! Can you think a single thought that makes sense, Kröger? Have you peace of mind enough to work out any little thing, anything pointed and effective, with all this indecent itching in your blood and a whole swarm of irrelevant sensations pestering you, which turn out when you examine them to be absolutely trivial, unusable rubbish? As for me, I’m off to the café. It’s neutral territory, you know, untouched by change of season; it, so to speak, symbolizes literature--that remote and sublime sphere in which one is incapable of grosser thoughts. . .’ And off he went to the café, and perhaps I should have followed him. . .

“One certainly does work badly in spring: and why? Because one’s feelings are being stimulated. And only amateurs think that a creative artist can afford to have feelings. It’s a naïve, amateur illusion; any genuine, honest artist will smile at it. Sadly, perhaps, but he will smile. Because, of course, what one says must never be one’s main concern. It must merely be the raw material, quite indifferent in itself, out of which the work of art is made, and the act of making must be a game, aloof and detached, performed in tranquility. If you attach too much importance to what you have to say, if it means too much to you emotionally, then you may be certain that your work will be a complete fiasco. You will become solemn, you will become sentimental, you will produce something clumsy, ponderous, pompous, ungainly, unironical, insipid, dreary, and commonplace; it will be of no interest to anyone, and you yourself will end up disillusioned and miserable. . . For that is how it is, Lisaveta: emotion, warm heartfelt emotion, is invariably commonplace and unserviceable. . . All emotion, all strong emotion, lacks taste. As soon as an artist becomes human and begins to feel, he is finished as an artist.”

(from Tonio Kröger, published in 1902, when Mann was 25)

Of course, this being the perspective of a fictional character, it is almost equally likely to have contradicted Mann’s actual feelings on the matter as it is to have coincided with them, but given the somewhat unsympathetic manner in which he tends to depict the suffering artist in general, I imagine the latter is more plausible.

While I’m not sure I agree with the assessment altogether, I do feel Mann (through Kröger) was onto something. A degree of emotional involvement is necessary for inspiration (otherwise, why write at all?), but I think proper execution does demand a certain distancing of the artist from his art. Just as one tends to overlook the flaws of those dear to him, so will he fail to notice or choose to ignore the flaws of his own work if he thinks too highly of it.

I think W.B. Yeats put it best, and far more succinctly: “Rhetoric is fooling others. Sentimentality is fooling yourself.”