Stories by Lawrence and Mann that touch on their major themes

Read two more stories in that beat-up old anthology I carried w/ me over the weekend, each in its way very typical of the work of its respective author, and in compressed form: like taking a Thomas Mann pill or a D.H. Lawrence pill w/out having to read The Magic Mountain or Women in Love (just kidding - each novel worth reading and a great story always stands up well in its own right): Mann's The Infant Prodigy is one I'd never read before, about a 9-year-old musician-composer who gives a concert under the wing of an impressario and a doting mother; Mann gives us, over the course of the performance and, briefly, the reception, the interior thoughts of the child performer and many in the audience, and in doing so touches on some of his key themes: the mesmerizing nature of performance ( cf Mario and the Magician), the difference between true art and bourgeois conception of art, the scorn and contempt for those who think they understand and appreciate art but have not devoted their lives to the pursuit of or appreciation of beauty (Tonio Kroger), and even a hint of the old man's attraction to dapper young boys ( Death in Venice) - not his most artful story by any means but a catalog of some of his thoughts, precepts, and themes. Lawrence's The Horse Dealer's Daughter - though it's not about a coal miner nor about an aspiring artist or writer, captures the loneliness and darkness of a midlands industrial village, especially the miserable captivity of a man of intelligence and intellect consigned to that life - and the hardness of family life, especially for a woman with no or few options: daughter of a late failed horse dealer (a looming presence who never appears in the story) has to break up the family household - each of her 3 brothers, though now penniless, has somewhere to go to continue on with their lives, but she doesn't; she attempts suicide by walking into a clay-pit pond and is rescued by the local doctor, a friend of her brothers; he takes her home, revives her, wraps her in blankets - and as she comes to she begins kissing him frantically, and he realizes - or at least he says - that he loves her; the appear to have sex (DHL unusually coy on this point), and we see that their lives have been changed by this unexpected physical encounter; the sexual energy of the story - cutting through the dire and abject poverty of these lives - very typical of DHL, even extends to his description of the horses that opens the story, and for a strange and poignant touch he has the doctor feeling very sick with a serious cold - and we can't help but think of DHL himself and the TB that eventually killed him in his 40s or so.