He stood beside her, held his right hand supported on his hip, and with his left he twirled his brown moustache rapidly. His slanting eyebrows were in sombre, strained agitation, and he was whistling softly to himself, as usual. He was dressed well and with the utmost care, in a conservatively cut suit of restful grey. But on his studied forehead, across which his dark hair was parted with such extraordinary simplicity and exactness, there was a twitching of the nerves. His southern features were already sharp, as though they had been gone over and marked with a hard pencil; while his mouth seemed so lightly outlined, his chin formed so softly. … After a time he ran his hand across his eyes and forehead, and turned away.
“I should not have come,” he said.
“Why shouldn’t you, Tonio Kröger?”
“I have just left off from working, Lisaweta, and things are just about the same in my head as on this canvas; a scaffolding, a faint first draft dirtied with corrections, and a few splotches of colour, yes. And now I come here and see the same thing. And I find here again the conflict and antagonism,” he said, sniffing the air, “which plagues me at home! It is strange. If you are ruled by a thought, you find it expressed everywhere; you can even smell it on the wind. Fixative and the aroma of spring, yes? Art and—well, what is the other? Don’t say ‘nature,’ Lisaweta. ‘Nature’ is not exhausting. Ah, no, I should best have gone for a walk, although it is a question whether I would have felt any better if I had. Five minutes ago, not far from here, I met a colleague, Adalbet, the short-story writer. ‘God damn the spring!’ he said in his aggressive manner. ‘It always has been, and always will be, the most atrocious season! Can you lay hold of a sensible idea, Kröger, can you work out the slightest touch and effect in peace, when there is an indecent tingling in your blood, and you are disturbed by a lot of improper sensations which, as you examine them, turn out to be hopelessly trivial and completely worthless junk? For my part, I’m going now to the café. That is neutral territory, untouched by the change of seasons; it represents, you see, what we might call the cloistered and exalted sphere of the literary, where we are capable only of ideas with some distinction. …’ And he went to the café; and perhaps I should have gone along.”
Lisaweta was amused.
“Very good, Tonio Kröger. Very good—that about the ‘indecent tingling.’ And he is certainly right to a degree, for spring really isn’t specially conducive to work. But now pay attention. Now, nevertheless, I am still working on this little thing here, this slight touch and effect, as Adalbet would say. Afterwards let’s go into the salon and drink tea, and you talk yourself out; for I see plainly enough that you are filled up today. Until then arrange yourself anywhere, on the chest there, for instance, if you aren’t afraid for your patrician clothes. …”
“Oh, leave me in peace about my clothes, Lisaweta Iwanowna! Do you want me to be running around in a torn velvet jacket or a red silk vest? As artists we are always adventurers enough inside ourselves. Externally we shall dress well, the devil! and act like respectable people. … No, I am not filled up,” he said, and looked on while she prepared a mixture on her palette. “You hear, there is simply a problem, an antagonism, on my mind and disturbing me in my work. … Now, what were we just speaking of? Of Adalbet, the short-story writer, and what a proud and firm man he is. ‘Spring is the most atrocious season,’ he said, and went into the café. For you have to know what you want, isn’t that so? See: I too am made nervous by spring, I too am confused by the sweet triviality of the memories and sensations that it arouses; except that I cannot bring myself to complain against it and despise it for that. For the fact is that spring makes me ashamed, ashamed of its pure naturalness and its triumphant youth. And I don’t know whether to envy or despise Adalbet for knowing nothing of these things. …
“We work poorly in the spring, of course; and why? Because we feel, and because anyone is a duffer to think that the creator dare feel. Every genuine and conscientious artist smiles at the naivete of this quack notion—with melancholy perhaps, but he smiles. For what people say must never be the main thing, but only the material, unimportant of itself, out of which the structure is put together in times of a calm, playful superiority. If you are too close to what you have to say, if your heart beats too warmly over it, then you can be sure of a complete fiasco. You become pathetic, you become sentimental; something stodgy, heavy, ungoverned, unironical, unseasoned, boring, banal originates under your hands, and the result is nothing but indifference on the part of others and disillusion and distress on the part of yourself. … For it is really so, Lisaweta: emotion, warm hearty emotion is always banal and useless: and only the irritations and the cold ecstasies of our corrupt, our expert nervous system, are artistic. One must be something extrahuman and inhuman, before he will stand in a peculiarly distant and impartial relationship to the human, before he will
