Tonio Kröger’s heart contracted painfully at this thought. To feel marvellous, playful, and moody powers stirring within you, and yet to know that those people you hanker after are standing off from you in good-natured inaccessibility—that is very distressing. But although he was standing before a drawn blind, lonely, excluded, and without hope, and in his misery was acting as though he could see out, yet he was happy. For now his heart was alive. Warmly and sadly it was beating for you, Ingeborg Holm, and his thoughts embraced your blonde, light, and impertinently ordinary little person in blissful self-denial.
More than once he stood hot-faced in lonely spots, where music, the smell of flowers, and the tinkling of glasses penetrated but softly; he tried to distinguish your ringing voice from among the distant sounds of the entertainment; he stood in pain on account of you—and was happy nevertheless. More than once it distressed him that he was able to talk with Magdalena Vermehren who always fell down, that she understood him and laughed with him and was serious, while blonde Inge, although he sat next to her, seemed distant and foreign and estranged from him, for his language was not her language—and he was happy nevertheless. For happiness, he told himself, is not to be loved; that is a gratification of vanity, mixed with repugnance. Happiness is to love, and perhaps to snatch deceitful little moments of nearness to the object of love. And he wrote this thought down inside him, thought it out completely, and felt it to the very roots.
“Faithfulness!” Tonio Kröger thought. “I will be faithful and love you, Ingeborg, as long as I live!” He was as well-meaning as all that. Yet inside him there was a soft whispering of fear and sorrow, for he had really forgotten Hans Hansen entirely, and he saw him every day. And the ugly and deplorable thing was that this soft and somewhat crafty voice proved right: time passed and days came when Tonio Kröger was not so thoroughly prepared to die for cheerful Inge, since he felt within him desires and power to accomplish a lot of remarkable things in this world, after his fashion.
And he moved warily about the sacrificial altar on which the pure chaste flame of his love was burning, he knelt before it and fanned and fed it in every way, since he wanted to be faithful. And yet after a while, unnoticeably, without excitement or noise, it was out.
But Tonio stood for a long time before the cold altar, filled with astonishment and disillusion over the fact that faithfulness was impossible on this earth. Then he shrugged his shoulders and went his way.
III
He went the way he had to go, a little negligently and irregularly, whistling to himself, with his head bent to one side, and looking into the distance; and if he got on the wrong track, this happened because for some people there really is no right track. If he was asked what in all the world he intended to become, he was accustomed to say (and had already written it down as well) that he bore within himself the possibilities for a thousand forms of existence, together with the intimate awareness that at bottom they were all impossibilities. …
Even before leaving his cramped native city, he had gently broken the holds and cords which bound him to it. The old Kröger family had gradually slipped into a condition of decay and disintegration; and people had cause to consider Tonio Kröger’s own nature and habits among the evidences of this condition. His father’s mother, the head of the family, had died; and his father, the tall, thoughtful, carefully dressed gentleman with the wild flower in his buttonhole, followed her soon afterwards. The large house of the Krögers, with all its noble history, stood for sale, and the firm was dissolved. Still, Tonio’s mother, his beautiful emotional mother who played the piano and the mandolin so wonderfully and who never minded about anything, had become engaged again after a year’s interval—and to a musician at that, a virtuoso with an Italian name, and she went with him into the blue distance. Tonio Kröger found this a bit loose; but who was he to stop her? He wrote verses and couldn’t even say what in the whole world he intended to become. …
And he left his winding native city with the damp wind blowing around its gables, left the fountain and the old walnut-tree in the garden, the confidants of his youth, left also the sea which he loved so well—and felt no pain at this. For he had grown big and wise, had understood how things stood with him, and was full of scorn for this stodgy and low-visioned existence which had held him so long.
He surrendered himself wholly to that power which seemed to him most illustrious, which he felt called upon to serve and which promised him rank and honours—the power of the mind and the word which reigns smiling over blind, inarticulate life. With his youthful passion he devoted himself to it, and it repaid him with all it has to give, and it took from him mercilessly all it is wont to take as compensation.
It sharpened
