The cyclist, by contrast, blond and blue-eyed, is simply unreflective, unproblematic Life, ``blithe and carefree.'' ``He made no claims to belong to the great and mighty of this earth.''

Piepsam is grotesque, a disturbing parody; his end is ridiculous and trivial. He is ``a man raving mad on the way to the churchyard.'' But he is more interesting than the others, the ones who come from the highroad to watch him, more interesting than Life considered as a cyclist. And if I have gone into so much detail about so small a work, that is because it is also so typical a work, representing the germinal form of a conflict which remains essential in Mann's writing: the crude sketch of Piepsam contains, in its critical, destructive and self-destructive tendencies, much that is enlarged and illuminated in the figures of, for instance, Naphta and Leverku^hn.

In method as well as in theme this little anecdote with its details selected as much for expressiveness and allegory as for ``realism,'' anticipates a kind of musical composition, as well as a kind of fictional composition, in which, as Leverku^hn says, ``there shall be nothing unthematic.'' It resembles, too, pictures such as Du^rer and Bruegel did, in which all that looks at first to be solely pictorial proves on inspection to be also literary, the representation of a proverb, for example, or a deadly sin.

``Gladius Dei'' (1902) resembles ``The Way to the Churchyard'' in its representation of a conflict between light and dark, between ``Life'' and a spirit of criticism, negation, melancholy, but it goes considerably further in characterizing the elements of this conflict.