Then, along with the pain and the hauteur of knowledge, came lonesomeness; since he could not endure to be among the innocent with their good-natured muddled attitudes; and the mark on his brow disturbed them. … But he was sweetened more and more by his delight with words and form, for he would say (and he had written it down already) that the knowledge of the soul alone would inevitably make us dismal if it weren’t that the satisfaction of expression kept us alert and brisk. …
He lived in large cities and in the south where he expected the sun to give a rich ripeness to his art; and perhaps it was also the blood of his mother that drew him here. But since his heart was dead and without love, he dropped into adventures of the flesh, descended deep into debauchery and passionate guilt—and suffered unspeakably from it all. Perhaps it was the heritage from his father, the tall, thoughtful, neatly dressed man with the wild flower in his buttonhole, which made him suffer so much down south and often aroused in him the faint melancholy memory of his former well-being as a boy, which he never found again in any of his pleasures.
A repugnance and hatred for the senses took hold of him; he hankered after purity and the contentment of respectability, yet he went on breathing the atmosphere of art, the sweet, mild, scent-laden atmosphere of a continual spring, where things bud and brew and sprout with the mysterious joy of creation. So it came down to this: vacillating between over-strong extremes, tossed back and forth between icy intellectualism and devouring sensuality, he led an exhausting life under the pangs of conscience, a fastidious, dissolute and extraordinary life, which he, Tonio Kröger, in the last analysis abhorred. “What vagrancy!” he thought at times. “Just how was it possible for me to run into all these eccentric adventures? At bottom, I am no gipsy in a green wagon. …”
But in proportion as his health was weakened, the mastery of his art was sharpened. He became picky, exacting, precious, subtle, easily irritated by the banal, and extremely sensitive in matters of tact and taste. When he came before the public for the first time, those who were concerned with such matters voiced much approval and delight, for it was a well-wrought thing that he had offered, full of humour and the knowledge of suffering. And his name, the very one his teachers had called him by when they reprimanded him, the very one with which he had signed the first rhymes to the walnut-tree, the fountain, and the sea, this sound compounded of South and North, this bourgeois name with its touch of exoticism, rapidly became a label to signify excellence. For the painful radicalism of his experiences was coupled to a rare, doggedly persistent, and fame-hungry industriousness; and this, battling with the hypercritical keenness of his tastes, produced unusual works under conditions of acute distress.
He didn’t write like someone who works to live, but like a person who wants to do nothing but work because he holds his mere existence as nothing, wishing to be taken into account only as a creator, and going about soberly and inconspicuously, like an actor who, without his makeup, is nothing so long as he has nothing to represent. He worked, unseen, in silence, alone, and was filled with disdain for those trivial writers whose talent was a social asset, who, whether they happened to be rich or poor, went about wildly and irresponsibly, giving their best to the choice of appropriate neckties, devoting themselves first of all to the problem of living happily, amiably, and artistically, unaware that good works originate only under the pressure of a poor life, that those who live do not work, and that a man must be dead in order to be totally a creator.
IV
“Am I intruding?” Tonio Kröger asked, at the door of the studio. He held his hat in his hand and even bowed a little, although Lisaweta Iwanowna was his friend and he said everything to her.
“Spare yourself, Tonio Kröger, and come in without ceremony!” she answered with her swift accent. “It is well known that you had the advantage of a good upbringing, and know what is proper.” She put her brush in her left hand with the palette, held out her right hand to him, and looked into his face, laughing and shaking her head.
“Yes, but you are working,” he said. “Let me look. … Oh, you have progressed.” And he observed alternately the two painted sketches leaning against chairs on either side of the easel, and the large canvas with its network of squares where, in the confused and shadowy charcoal outline, the first spots of colour were beginning to emerge.
It was in Munich, in a back building of Schellingstrasse, several stories high. Outside, beyond the broad north window, were sunshine, the twitter of birds, and the blue sky. The fresh sweet smell of spring streamed in through an open shutter and mingled with the odour of fixative and oils which filled the workroom. Unhindered, the golden light of the brilliant afternoon flooded the large barren studio; it shone confidently across the somewhat dilapidated floor, across the crude table beneath the window covered with bottles, tubes, and brushes, and across the unframed studies on the unpapered walls; it shone on the torn silk folding screen which marked off a little stylishly furnished living-room and cosy corner near the door; it shone on the unfinished work on the easel, and on the painter and the writer in front of it.
She was probably as old as he, which is to say
