I

It was hardly more than a wretched pretext of a sun that stood over the huddled city, milky and pale behind layers of clouds. The streets with their gabled houses were damp and windy; and often a kind of soft hail fell, not snow, and not ice.

School was out. Hordes of liberated children were streaming across the paved court out through the iron gate, separating and hurrying off to right and left. Big students held their books pressed with dignity high up against the left shoulder, while with their right arm they steered against the wind towards dinner. The smaller ones dropped into a cheerful trot which made the slush splash about them and set the accoutrements of knowledge to clattering in their sealskin satchels. But occasionally there would be a general pious-eyed doffing of caps before the Odin’s-hat and the Jupiter’s-beard of a gravely advancing professor.

“So you finally came, Hans?” said Tonio Kröger. He had been waiting on the viaduct for a long while; smiling, he approached his friend, who was coming through the gate in conversation with other companions and was just about to go along with them⁠ ⁠…

“What’s that?” he asked, and looked at Tonio. “Yes, that is so! Let’s walk a bit now.”

Tonio was silent, and his eyes grew sad. Hans had forgotten; it hadn’t occurred to him again until now that they were going to take a little walk together this noontime. And he himself had almost lived in the expectancy of this ever since they had agreed on it.

“Yes, goodbye, you!” Hans Hansen said to his comrades. “I’ll go a little ways with Kröger then,”⁠—and the two turned to the left, while the others shuffled off to the right.

Hans and Tonio had time for a walk after school because they both came from homes where lunch was not served until four o’clock. Their fathers were prominent wholesale merchants who held public offices in the city. For several generations the Hansens had owned the extensive lumber yards down by the river where powerful saws hissed and screeched as they cut into the logs. But Tonio was the son of the Consul Kröger, whose sacks of vegetables with the broad black imprint of the firm could be seen driven through the streets day after day; and the large old house of his forefathers was the most magnificent one in the whole city.⁠ ⁠… On account of their many acquaintances, the friends had to keep doffing their caps continually, and by many people the two fourteen-year-old boys were even spoken to first.

Both had their schoolbags slung over their shoulders; and both were well and comfortably dressed: Hans in a short reefer’s jacket covered on the back and shoulders by the wide blue collar of his sailor suit, and Tonio in a grey belted overcoat. Hans was wearing a sailor hat with short ribbons, and a shock of his straw-coloured hair protruded from underneath. He was extraordinarily pretty and well-formed, broad in the shoulders and small in the hips, with sharp widely-set steel-blue eyes. But under Tonio’s round fur cap, out of a dark face which was quite southern in the sharpness of the features, two sombre and delicately shadowed eyes with over-heavy lids looked forth dreamily and a little timidly.⁠ ⁠… His mouth and chin were moulded with unusual softness. He walked negligently and irregularly, while Hans’s lanky legs in their black stockings kept time and stepped out so elastically.⁠ ⁠…

Tonio did not speak. He was miserable. Knitting his somewhat slanting eyebrows, and with his lips rounded for whistling, he bowed his head and looked sideways into the distance. This posture and expression were peculiar to him.

Suddenly Hans thrust his arm beneath Tonio’s and gave him a side-glance, for he understood very plainly what it was all about. And although Tonio kept silent for the next few steps, yet he suddenly became very pliable.

“I didn’t forget it at all, Tonio,” Hans said, and looked down in front of him at the pavement. “But I just thought that nothing could come of it, because it is so wet and windy. But I don’t mind that in the least, and I think it was great of you to wait for me anyhow. I thought you must have gone home, and I was sorry⁠ ⁠…”

At these words Tonio became agitated and exultant.

“Yes, now let’s go over the walls,” he said with emotion. “Across the Mill-wall and the Holsten-wall, and then I’ll take you home, Hans.⁠ ⁠… No, no⁠—it doesn’t matter at all if I have to go back alone. The next time you will come with me.”

At bottom he didn’t believe very firmly what Hans had told him; and he felt sure that Hans laid only half as much weight on their walk as he. Yet he saw that Hans regretted his forgetfulness and was doing his best to placate him. And he had little intention of refusing to be placated.⁠ ⁠…

The fact was that Tonio loved Hans Hansen and had already suffered much through him. Whoever loves the more is at a disadvantage and must suffer⁠—his fourteen years of life had already taught him this hard simple fact. And it was like him that he should note such discoveries, should register them inside himself and get a certain pleasure from them, without really using them as defences or deriving any practical value out of them. And also it was natural with him to rate such acquisitions as far more important and more interesting than the knowledge which was forced upon him at school, and even to devote his hours of instruction in the Gothic-vaulted classroom mostly to testing out the full burden of such observations, and pondering on them. And this occupation gave him as much satisfaction as when he would go about his room with his violin (for he played the violin) and let its tones melt softly into the murmuring of the fountain which rose dancing below in the garden under the branches of the old walnut-tree.⁠ ⁠…

The fountain, the old walnut-tree, his violin, and in the distance the ocean, the Baltic whose summer dreams he was allowed to hear during vacations⁠—it was these things that he loved; he surrounded himself with them, you might say; and his inner life took its course among them. The names of these things can be used with good effect in verse, and they actually did keep recurring in the verses which Tonio Kröger composed now and then.

This fact, that he possessed a book of verses which he had written himself, became known through his own fault; and it did him much damage with both his fellow students and the teachers. On the one hand, the Consul Kröger’s son found it stupid and vulgar of them to take offence at this, and he disrespected both students and teachers, whose bad manners alienated him besides, and whose personal weaknesses he penetrated with unusual keenness. But, on the other hand, he himself felt something illicit and improper in the writing of verses; and in a measure he must yield to all those who considered it an occupation to look askance at. Yet that did not enable him to renounce it.⁠ ⁠…

Since he wasted his time at home, was slow and poor at concentration in his studies, and was always marked down by his teachers, he was continually bringing home the wretchedest reports; whereupon his father, a tall, scrupulously dressed man with thoughtful blue eyes who always wore a wild flower in his buttonhole, would display great anger and distress. Nevertheless, Tonio’s mother, his beautiful black-haired mother whose Christian name was Consuelo and who was so totally different from the other women of the city, since his father had once gone and gotten her from away down on the map⁠—his mother was absolutely indifferent to these reports.⁠ ⁠…

Tonio loved his dark and emotional mother, who played the piano and the mandolin so marvellously; and he was glad that she was not disturbed over his questionable status among mankind. But, on the other hand, he felt that his father’s anger was vastly more dignified and more respectable; and in spite of the scoldings, he was in perfect agreement with his father at bottom, while he found his mother’s gay indifference a little bit loose. Often his thoughts ran something like this: “It is enough that I am what I am and neither can nor will change myself⁠—indolent, unruly, and concerned with things which nobody else thinks about. At least it is right for me to be soundly reprimanded and punished for this, and not have it all passed over with kisses and music. We aren’t gipsies in a green wagon, but respectable people, Consul Krögers, the Kröger family.”⁠ ⁠… Nor was it rare for him to think: “Why am I so strange and so at odds with things, falling out with my teachers and never intimate with the other boys? Look at them, the good scholars and the solid middling ones. They don’t find the teachers comic, they don’t make verses, and they just think things which everyone thinks and which can be spoken out loud. What regular and comfortable terms they must be on with everything and everybody! That must be good.⁠ ⁠… But what is wrong with me, and what will come of all this?”

This manner of looking at himself and his relation to life played an important role in Tonio’s love for Hans Hansen. He loved him first because he was beautiful, but next because here was what seemed to be in every way his own counterpart and opposite. Hans Hansen was a splendid scholar, and a good fellow besides; he rode, belonged to a gymnasium, swam like a hero, and enjoyed general popularity. The teachers were almost tender in their liking for him, called him by his first name, and helped him in every way; his comrades tried to win his favour, and on the street ladies and gentlemen stopped him, grabbed him by the shock of straw-coloured hair which protruded from under his sailor cap, and said: “Good day, Hans Hansen, with your neat head of hair! Are you head of the class yet? Remember me to Papa and Mamma, my good lad.⁠ ⁠…”

Such was Hans Hansen; and ever since Tonio Kröger had known him he felt a yearning whenever he looked at him, an envious yearning which sat above the breast and burned. “Who else,” he thought, “could have such blue eyes as you, and live on such natural and intimate terms with everyone? You are always occupied with something highly proper and generally respectable. When you have finished your school assignments, then you take riding-lessons or work with the compass-saw; and even in vacations, by the sea, you are taken up with rowing, sailing, and swimming, while I lie forlorn and idle in the sand, and stare at the mysterious changes shifting across the face of the sea. But that’s why your eyes are so clear. To be like you⁠ ⁠…”

He did not make the attempt to be like Hans Hansen, and perhaps he was not even very earnest in his wish. But he hungered painfully, such as he was, to be loved by him; and he bid for his love after his fashion, a slow, thorough, and devoted fashion, passionate and melancholy, but with a melancholy that can burn deeper and more devouringly than all the abrupt passion which his appearance might have led one to expect.

And he did not bid in vain, for Hans, who respected a certain superiority in him, a trick of the lips which enabled Tonio to express difficult things, understood quite well that here was an unusually strong and tender feeling for him; he showed his gratitude and gave Tonio much happiness by his response⁠—but also many tortures of jealousy, of disillusion, and of frustrated efforts to establish a mental union. For it was a remarkable fact that Tonio, although he envied Hans Hansen for his manner of living, was continually trying to win him over to his own⁠—which could succeed only for moments, at best, and then only superficially.⁠ ⁠…

“I just read something wonderful, something splendid,” he said. They were walking along and both eating out of a poke of fruit candy which they had bought for ten pfennigs from Jiverrsen’s store in the Mühlenstrasse. “You must read it, Hans; it is Don Carlos, by Schiller.⁠ ⁠… I will lend it to you if you want.⁠ ⁠…”

“Ah, no,” Hans Hansen said; “forget that, Tonio; that doesn’t suit me. I’ll stick to my horse books, you know. There are some great pictures in them, I’ll tell you. Sometime when you are at our house I’ll show them to you. They are snapshots, and show the nags trotting, galloping, and vaulting, in all the positions which you are never able to see in real life because it goes too fast.⁠ ⁠…”

“In all positions?” Tonio asked politely. “Yes, that is fine. But as for Don Carlos, it beats everything imaginable. There are places in it, you’ll see, which are so beautiful that you feel a shock, a kind of explosion.”

“An explosion?” Hans Hansen asked. “How is that?”

“For example, there is the place where the king has cried because he was deceived by the marquis, but the marquis has deceived him only through love of the prince, you understand, for whom he sacrifices himself, and now the news comes from the cabinet to the antechamber that the king has cried. ‘Cried? The king cried?’ All the courtiers are frightfully affected, and it goes right through you, because he is a frightfully stern and rigid king. But it is so plain why he cried, and it really makes me sadder than it does the prince and the marquis put together. He is always so completely alone and without love, and now he believes he has found someone, and this man betrays him.⁠ ⁠…”

Hans Hansen looked sideways into Tonio’s face, and something in this face really must have won him over to the subject, for he suddenly shoved his arm back under Tonio’s again and asked:

“Just how does he betray him, Tonio?”

Tonio became agitated.

“Yes, the fact is,” he began, “that all letters to Brabant and Flanders⁠ ⁠…”

“There comes Erwin Jimmerthal,” Hans said.

Tonio was silent. “I wish the earth would swallow him up, this Jimmerthal!” he thought. “Why must he come and disturb us? If only he doesn’t walk with us the whole way and talk about his riding-lesson!” For Erwin Jimmerthal had just had a riding-lesson. He was the son of the bank-director, and lived out here beyond the Gate. With his bowed legs and narrow eyes, he was coming towards them along the avenue, his schoolbag missing already.

“Hello, Jimmerthal,” Hans cried. “I am taking a little walk with Kröger⁠ ⁠…”

“I have to go to town,” Jimmerthal said, “and see about something. But I will go along a little piece with you two. That must be fruit candy you have there? Yes, thanks, I’ll take some. Tomorrow we have another lesson, Hans.” The riding-lesson was meant.

“Great!” Hans said. “Do you know, I am getting leather leggings now, because I just got the high mark in drill.”

“You don’t have any riding-lessons, do you, Kröger?” Jimmerthal asked, and his eyes were nothing but two white slits.

“No,” Tonio answered hesitatingly.

“You should ask your father,” Hans Hansen observed, “to let you take lessons too, Kröger.”

“Yes,” Tonio said, hastily and indifferently. For a moment he felt a lump in his throat, because Hans had called him by his last name. And Hans seemed to feel this, for he said in explanation:

“I call you Kröger because your first name is so crazy. You won’t mind, will you? but I can’t stand it.⁠ ⁠… That is really no name at all. Still, you can’t help yourself any!”

“No, you have that name mainly because it sounds foreign and is unusual,” Jimmerthal said, and acted as though he had intended to make everything all right.

Tonio’s mouth twitched. He pulled himself together and said:

“Yes, it is a stupid name; God knows I’d rather be called Heinrich or Wilhelm, you can be sure of that. But it comes from the fact that I was named after one of my mother’s brothers who is called Tonio; for my mother comes from down south.”

Then he was silent and let the two of them discuss horses and harness. Hans had taken Jimmerthal by the arm and talked with a fluent sympathy which could never have been aroused in him for Don Carlos.⁠ ⁠… From time to time Tonio felt his nose prickling with the desire to cry. Also he had difficulty in keeping his chin under control, for it continually threatened to tremble.

Hans could not stand his name⁠—what was to be done? He himself was called Hans, and Jimmerthal was called Erwin; good, they were commonly known names which nobody resented. But “Tonio” was something foreign and unusual. Yes, in every way there was always something unusual about him, whether he wanted it or not⁠—and he was alone and shut out from the regular and the ordinary, although he was certainly no gipsy in the green wagon, but a son of Consul Kröger, from the Kröger family.⁠ ⁠… But why did Hans call him Tonio so long as they were alone, if, when a third person came up, he began to be ashamed of him? At times he was near him and won over to him, that was true. “Just how does he betray him, Tonio?” he had asked, and taken him by the arm. But when Jimmerthal had arrived, he had breathed easier nevertheless, had abandoned him and had gone out of his road to complain about his foreign Christian name. How sad it was to have to see through all this!⁠ ⁠… At bottom Hans Hansen cared for him a bit when they were alone; he knew it. But when a third person came, then he was ashamed of him and threw him over. And he was alone again. He thought of King Philip. The king had cried.

“Oh, Lord!” Erwin Jimmerthal said. “But now I must really go back to town. Goodbye, you two, and thanks for the fruit candy!” Then he leaped to a bench standing by the road, ran along it with his bowed legs, and went trotting away.

“Jimmerthal is not bad!” Hans said emphatically. He had a pampered and self-conscious way of announcing his sympathies and dislikes by passing judgment like a sovereign.⁠ ⁠… And then he continued talking about the riding-lesson because he was already started. And it wasn’t so far now to the Hansens’ home. The road across the walls did not require so much time. They held on to their caps and bent their heads before the strong damp wind which moaned and whistled in the bare branches of the trees. And Hans Hansen talked, while Tonio simply put in now and then an artificial “Oh” and “Yes, yes,” without any pleasure in the fact that in the excitement of his conversation Hans had taken his arm again; for that was simply an apparent intimacy, without significance.

Then they left the wall near the railroad station, watched a train puffing by in clumsy hastiness, counted the cars for a pastime, and waved at the man who was sitting in the rear of the very last one, muffled up in his fur coat. And on the Lindenplatz, in front of the wholesaler Hansen’s villa, they stopped; and Hans demonstrated minutely how amusing it is to hang on the garden gate and swing back and forth on the hinges until they creaked. And then he said that he must leave.

“Yes, I have to go in,” he said. “Goodbye, Tonio. The next time I’ll go home with you for sure.”

“Goodbye, Hans,” Tonio said. “It was nice to go for a walk.”

Their hands which pressed each other were all wet and rusty from the garden gate. But when Hans looked into Tonio’s eyes, something like remorse showed in his pretty face.

“Anyhow, I’ll read Don Carlos soon,” he said hurriedly. “That about the king in the cabinet must be great!” Then he put his schoolbag under his arm and ran through the front garden. Before disappearing in the house, he nodded back once more.

And Tonio Kröger went away from there winged and transfigured. The wind bore him along from behind; but that was not the only reason that he left so lightly.

Hans would read Don Carlos, and they would have something in common, which neither Jimmerthal nor anyone else could discuss with them! How well they understood each other! Who could tell⁠—perhaps he could even bring him to the point of writing verses?⁠ ⁠… No, no, he didn’t want that! Hans should not become like Tonio, but remain what he was, so bright and strong, the way everyone loved him, and Tonio most of all! But still it wouldn’t hurt if he read Don Carlos.⁠ ⁠… And Tonio went through the old squat gate, went along the harbour, and up the steep, damp, and windy gable-lined street to the house of his parents. His heart now was alive: he felt longings and brooding envy, and just a little disdain, and a very shy happiness.

II

Blonde Inge, Ingeborg Holm, the daughter of Dr. Holm who lived near the market, there where the Gothic well stood high, complex, and pointed⁠—she it was whom Tonio Kröger loved when he was sixteen years old.

How did it happen? He had seen her thousands of times; yet one evening he saw her in a certain light, saw how, while talking with a girl friend, she laughingly tossed her head to one side with a kind of insolence, touched the back of her head with a not especially slender, not especially delicate girlish hand, so that the white gauze sleeve slipped back from her elbow, heard how she stressed a word, an unimportant word, in a certain way, which gave a warm resonance to her voice⁠—and a thrill went through him, much stronger than he used to feel at times when he looked at Hans Hansen, in those days when he was a little stupid boy.

On this evening he carried away her image, with the thick blond plait, the narrow laughing blue eyes, and the delicate hint of freckles above the bridge of her nose. He could not go to sleep, because he heard the resonance in her voice; he tried softly to imitate the stress with which she had spoken the unimportant word, and he was horrified at the result. Experience taught him that this was love. He well knew that love would bring him much pain, distress, and humiliation, that it would, further, disturb his peace and fill the heart with melodies without allowing a person enough respite to round things out and calmly mould them into something solid; yet he accepted it with joy, yielded to it completely, nourished it wholeheartedly, for he knew that it makes rich and vital, and he yearned to be rich and vital, instead of rounding things out at his leisure.

This conquest of Tonio by the cheerful Inge Holm took place in the spacious salon of the Frau Consul Husteede, whose turn it was this evening to give the dancing-lesson. For it was a private course, and only members of the leading families took part, gathering in their parents’ houses consecutively in order to receive instruction in dancing and decorum. But expressly for this purpose dancing-master Knaak came here once a week from Hamburg.

François Knaak was his name, and what a man he was! “J’ai l’honneur de me vous représenter,” he said. “Mon nom est Knaak.⁠ ⁠… And you don’t say this while bowing, but not until you are standing erect again⁠—in a subdued tone, and yet clear. You are not always in a situation where you must introduce yourself in French, but if you can do it correctly and faultlessly in this language, then you won’t slip when it comes to German.” How wonderfully the black silk frock-coat clung to his fat hips! His trousers fell in soft folds down over his patent-leather shoes, which were ornamented with broad satin rosettes; and his brown eyes looked around with a resigned happiness upon their own beauty.

Everyone was awed by his wealth of sureness and propriety. He walked⁠—and no one walked like him, elastic, undulating, swaying, royal⁠—up to the mistress of the house, bowed, and waited for her hand to be extended to him. He received it, spoke his thanks softly, stepped back jauntily, turned on his left foot, speedily lifted the right with its compressed tip from the floor, and stepped away with shaking hips.⁠ ⁠…

You went backwards, and out through the door amid bowings if you were taking leave of company; you never pulled up a chair by grabbing it by one leg and sliding it along the floor, but you carried it lightly by the back and set it down noiselessly. You didn’t stand around with your hands folded across your stomach and your tongue stuck in one corner of your mouth; but if you did so, then Herr Knaak had a way of doing it after you, so that you would detest this position for the rest of your life.

That was decorum! But as to the dance, Herr Knaak was even more masterly here, if possible. In the spacious salon the gas flame burned in the chandelier, and the candles on the mantelpiece. The floor was strewn with talcum, and the students stood about in a silent semicircle. But beyond the portieres, in the adjoining room, the mothers and aunts were sitting on plush chairs and observing Herr Knaak through their lorgnettes, how he bent over, holding each lapel of his frock-coat with two fingers, and demonstrated the successive steps in the mazurka with quivering legs. But if he intended to dumbfound his public completely, he would suddenly and without provocation leap from the floor, spin his legs around in the air with bewildering swiftness, and fairly twinkle with same, whereupon with a thump which was subdued but yet shook everything in its firmness, he returned to this earth.⁠ ⁠…

“What an incredible ass!” Tonio thought deep down to himself. But he saw plainly that Inge Holm, cheerful Inge, often followed Herr Knaak’s movements with an unconscious smile, and this was not the only reason why all this marvellously piloted fleshiness wrung from him something like astonishment. How peacefully, how well beyond confusion, Herr Knaak’s eyes looked at things! They did not penetrate to those depths where things became complicated and sad; they knew nothing except that they were brown and beautiful. But for that reason his bearing was so proud! Yes, a person must be stupid to be able to walk like him; and then a person was liked, since he deserved it. He understood it so well that Inge, blonde sweet Inge, looked at Herr Knaak the way she did. But why would a girl never look at himself like that?

But yet, that happened. There was Magdalena Vermehren, the daughter of Vermehren the attorney, with the sweet mouth and the large, dark, glittering eyes full of earnestness and reverie. She often fell while dancing; but she came to him when partners were chosen, she knew that he wrote verses, twice she had asked him to show them to her, and often she gazed at him from a distance with her head lowered. But what did that have to do with him? He, he loved Inge Holm, the blonde cheerful Inge, who surely must despise him because he wrote bits of poetry. He would look at her, see her narrow blue eyes full of happiness and scorn, and an envious yearning, a sharp oppressive pain that he was shut away from her and must always be foreign to her lay in his breast and burned.⁠ ⁠…

“First pair en avant!” Herr Knaak said, and no words can describe how wonderfully the man brought out the nasal sound. They were practising the quadrille, and to Tonio’s profound horror he found himself in one and the same carré with Inge Holm. He avoided her as well as he could, and yet he was continually finding himself near her; he struggled to keep his eyes away from her, and yet his glance was continually falling upon her.⁠ ⁠… Now she came sliding and running by, holding to redheaded Ferdinand Matthiessen; she threw back her plait and, breathing deeply, took her place opposite him. Herr Heinzelmann, the pianist, struck the keys with his bony hands, Herr Knaak gave the command: the quadrille began.

She moved about in front of him, back and forth, stepping and turning; often he caught a fragrance which came from her hair or the delicate white stuff of her dress, and his eyes became sadder and sadder. “I love you, dear, sweet Inge,” he said inwardly, and into these words he laid his distress that she was so eagerly and cheerfully absorbed in the matter at hand and did not notice him. He suddenly recalled a beautiful poem by Storm: “I’d like to sleep, but you must dance.” He was tortured by the humiliating anomaly in this having to dance while one is loving.⁠ ⁠…

“First pair en avant!” Herr Knaak said; then came a new turn. “Compliment! Moulinet des dames! Tour de main!” and no one will explain in what a gracious manner he swallowed the mute e of the de. “Second pair en avant!” Tonio Kröger and his lady were there. “Compliment!” and Tonio Kröger bowed. “Moulinet des dames!” And Tonio Kröger, with lowered head and gloomy brows, laid his hand upon the hands of the four ladies, upon that of Inge Holm, and danced moulinet.

On all sides a giggling and laughing started up. Herr Knaak fell into a ballet posture which expressed a conventionalized horror. “Alas!” he cried. “Stop, stop! Kröger is lost among the ladies! En arrière, Miss Kröger, back, fi donc! Everyone understood it except you. Shoo! Away! Back with you!” and he pulled out his yellow silk handkerchief and with it shooed Tonio Kröger back to his place.

Everyone laughed, the boys, the girls, and the ladies beyond the portieres, for Herr Knaak had made something just too funny out of the incident, and it was as amusing as in a theatre; except that Herr Heinzelmann was waiting with a dry businesslike expression for the sign to go on playing, as he was hardened to Herr Knaak’s effects.

Then the quadrille was continued, and then there was a pause. The maid came clattering through the door with a tray of glasses full of wine jelly, and the cook followed in her wake with a cargo of plum pudding. But Tonio Kröger stole away, went secretly out into the corridor and, his hands behind his back, stood before a window with its blind drawn; it did not occur to him that absolutely nothing could be seen through this blind and that it was ridiculous therefore to stand in front of it and act as though you were looking out.

But he was looking into himself, where there were so many sorrows and longings. Why, why was he here? Why was he not sitting by the window in his room, and reading Storm’s Immensee, and looking out now and then into the half-dark garden where the old walnut-tree was groaning cumbrously? That was his place. Let the others dance and apply themselves eagerly and competently to the matter at hand!⁠ ⁠… No, no, his place was here nevertheless, where he was assured of being near Inge even though he was simply standing by himself, far off from her, and trying to distinguish from the buzzing, clatter, and laughter her voice with its ring of warm life. Your narrow blue laughing eyes, you blonde Inge! People can be as beautiful and cheerful as you only if they don’t read Immensee and are never even tempted to do such things. That is the sad part of it!⁠ ⁠…

She had to come! She had to notice that he was gone, had to feel how things were with him, had to follow him secretly, if only out of sympathy, lay her hand on his shoulder, and say: “Come in with us, be gay, I love you.” And he listened behind him and waited in unreasoning suspense for her to come. But she came by no means. Such things never happened on this earth.

Had she laughed at him too, like all the others? Yes, she had done that, though he would gladly have denied it for her sake and his own. And yet it was only out of his absorption in her nearness that he had danced in the moulinet des dames. And what did that matter? Perhaps some day they would stop laughing! Hadn’t a magazine recently taken a poem of his, although it did go under before the poem had time to appear? The day would come when he was famous, when everything that he wrote was printed, and then they would see whether or not it would make an impression on Inge Holm.⁠ ⁠… It would not make an impression; no, that was a fact. On Magdalena Vermehren, who always fell down; yes, on her. But never on Inge Holm, on blue-eyed, cheerful Inge; and so wasn’t it all in vain?⁠ ⁠…

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 his eyes, and let him penetrate the big words which inflate men’s bosoms; it unlocked for him the souls of others and of himself, made him clairvoyant, and showed him the inside of things, all that lies behind words and actions. But what he saw was this: comedy and distress⁠—comedy and distress.

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 a little beyond thirty. In her dark blue spotted smock she sat on a low stool and rested her chin on her hand. Her brown hair, done tight against her head and already a little grey at the sides, covered her temples in light waves and framed her dark, Slavic, strongly sympathetic face, with the short nose, the sharply wrought cheekbones, and the little black glittering eyes. Tense, distrustful, and with a kind of irritation, she examined her work slantingly and with squinting eyes.⁠ ⁠…

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 be in a position where he will be tempted to play upon the human, to play with it, to present it effectively and tastefully. The gift for style, form, and expression already presupposes this cool and critical relationship with the human, even a certain human poverty and desolation. For the strong and healthy emotion⁠—there is no getting around it⁠—is without taste. It is all over with the artist as soon as he becomes a man and begins to feel. Adalbet knew that, and so he went into the café, into the ‘cloistered sphere,’ indeed!”

“Well, God help him, Batushka,” Lisaweta said, washing her hands in a tin basin. “You don’t need to follow him.”

“No, Lisaweta, I am not following him; and for the simple reason that I am now and then in a position where the springtime of my craft can shame me a little. You see, sometimes I receive letters from abroad, testimonials of praise and gratitude from my public, wonderful letters from people who have been moved. I read these letters, and am touched by the warm and helpless human emotions which my art has brought out; I am seized with a kind of pity for the enthusiastic naivete which speaks out of these lives; and I redden at the thought of how much these upright folks would be abashed if they got one look behind the scenes, if their innocence could ever conceive that a righteous, healthy, and respectable person simply does not write, mimic, compose.⁠ ⁠… None of which hinders me from using their admiration for my genius, for elevating and stimulating me; I take it tremendously in earnest, then make a face like an ape who is playing the great man.⁠ ⁠… Ah, don’t argue with me about that, Lisaweta! I tell you that I have often been tired to death of representing the human without participating in the human.⁠ ⁠… Is the artist a man at all? Let us ask ‘woman’ about that! It seems to me, we artists all share somewhat in the fate of those prepared papal singers⁠ ⁠… We sing with touching beauty, yet⁠—”

“You should be a bit ashamed, Tonio Kröger. Come to tea now. The water will be boiling immediately, and here are the cigarettes. You stopped at soprano-singing, and now go on. But you should be ashamed. If I didn’t know with what proud passionateness you are devoted to your calling⁠ ⁠…”

“Don’t speak of a ‘calling,’ Lisaweta Iwanowna! Literature is not a calling at all, but a curse, and that ends it. When does it begin to show itself, this curse? Early, frightfully early. At a time when one by rights should still be living in peace and accord with God and the world. You begin by feeling yourself set apart, in some mysterious antagonism to others, to the usual, the ordinary. The abyss of irony, disbelief, opposition, knowledge, feeling which separates you from people yawns deeper and deeper. You are alone, and henceforth there is no intercommunication. What a fate! Provided that your heart is sufficiently alive, sufficiently loving, to feel it as frightful!⁠ ⁠… Your self-consciousness takes fire, because you among thousands detect the mark on your brow and feel that it escapes no one. I knew an actor of genius who as a man had to fight against a sickly timidity and unsteadiness. His overly excited sense of his ego, together with his lack of a role, of something to perform, produced such an effect on this consummate artist and impoverished man. An artist, a real one, not one whose bourgeois calling is art, but one predestined and damned to art⁠—it takes little keenness to pick him out from a group of people. The sense of separateness, of not fitting in, of being known and looked at, something at once commanding and embarrassed, shows in his face. In the features of a prince who is walking in civilian dress among a crowd, you can observe something similar. But here no civilian clothes help, Lisaweta! Disguise yourself, mask yourself, dress like an attaché or like a lieutenant of the guard on furlough⁠—you hardly need to raise your eyes and speak a word, and everyone will know that you are not a human being, but something strange, something estranging, something different⁠ ⁠…

“But what is the artist? No question has demonstrated more acutely than this, humanity’s smugness and laziness of perception. ‘It is a gift,’ good people say humbly, when they are under the effects of an artist; and since, from their good-natured standpoint, pleasant and elevated effects must also have totally pleasant and elevated origins, no one suspects that perhaps here the most wretchedly conditioned, most utterly questionable ‘gift’ is involved.⁠ ⁠… It is well known that artists are very touchy⁠—now, it is also well known that this is not usually the case with people of good consciences and soundly established self-reliance.⁠ ⁠… You see, Lisaweta, in a more refined form I hold essentially to all the suspicions against the typical artist which any of my stoutly respectable forefathers up there in the narrow city would have brought against any mountebank and adventurous artist who might have entered his house. Listen to this. I know a banker, a grey-haired business man, who has a gift for writing stories. He makes use of this gift in his leisure hours, and his works are often quite distinguished. In spite of⁠—I say ‘in spite of’⁠—this sublime talent, this man is not entirely irreproachable. On the contrary, he has already had to serve a heavy sentence, and for very good reason at that. Yes, it happened very strangely that he became conscious of this gift for the first time while in the penitentiary, and his experiences as a convict form the central theme in all his productions. With a little boldness, one could deduce from this that in order to become a poet it is necessary to be at home in some kind of penitentiary. But doesn’t the suspicion arise that his experiences in the prison were less intimately connected with the roots and origins of his craft than was the element which brought him there? A banker who writes stories⁠—that is a rarity, is it not? But a noncriminal, a sound and irreproachable banker who writes stories⁠—that simply does not exist.⁠ ⁠… Yes, now you are laughing, and yet I was only half joking. No problem, none in the world, is more distressing than that of art and its effect. Take the most remarkable product of the most typical and therefore most powerful artists⁠—take such a morbid and deeply suggestive work as Tristan and Isolde, and observe the effect which this work exerts on a young, healthy man with thoroughly normal feelings. You see exaltation, strengthening, warm righteous enthusiasm, excitation perhaps to the point of actual ‘artistic’ creation.⁠ ⁠… The good dilettante! Among us artists it looks basically different from what he could ever imagine with his ‘warm heart’ and ‘noble enthusiasm.’ I have seen artists admired and fêted by women and young men, while I knew about them. In matters concerning the origin, and the conditions of art, and the phenomena which go hand in hand with art, we continually keep making the most remarkable discoveries⁠ ⁠…”

“About other people, Tonio Kröger⁠—pardon me⁠—or not merely about other people?”

He was silent. He knitted his slanting eyebrows and whistled to himself.

“Please let me have your cup, Tonio. It is not strong enough. And take another cigarette. Besides, you know very well that you see things in a manner in which they do not necessarily need to be seen.⁠ ⁠…”

“That is Horatio’s answer, my dear Lisaweta. ‘To look at things so,’ means ‘to look at them too closely,’ doesn’t it?”

“I say that we can look at them just as closely from another angle, Tonio Kröger. I am a mere stupid painter girl, and if I am able to make any objections to you, if I can somewhat protect your own calling from you, then it is sure to be nothing new which I advance, but merely a warning reminder to you of what you already know.⁠ ⁠… As for instance: the purifying, hallowing effect of literature; the destruction of the passions through knowledge and the word; literature as the road towards understanding, towards forgiveness and love; the emancipating power of speech; above all, the literary spirit as the noblest aspect of the human spirit, the literary man as the complete man, as saint⁠—to look at things in this way means not to look at them closely enough?”

“You have a right to speak like that, Lisaweta Iwanowna, and especially in view of the work of your poets, of the adorable Russian literature which so truly represents the holy literature you speak of. Yet I have not left your objections out of account, but they go along with all that is in my mind today.⁠ ⁠… Look at me. I do not seem inordinately cheerful, no? A bit old and sharp-featured and tired, isn’t that so? Now, returning to ‘knowledge,’ a person would let himself think that way who, essentially pious, softhearted, well-meaning, and a little sentimental, would be quite simply destroyed and annihilated by psychological clarity. Not to let oneself be overcome by the world’s sorrow; to observe, notice, accept even the wretchedest things, while keeping in good spirits in the perfect assurance of moral superiority over the repulsive invention of life.⁠—Yes, of course! Yet occasionally, in spite of all your delight in the expression, things become a little too much for you. Does understanding everything mean forgiving everything? I don’t know. There is something which I call the nausea of knowledge, Lisaweta: the condition wherein a man has simply to see through a thing in order to feel himself, not reconciled by any means, but disgusted to death⁠—the case of Hamlet the Dane, this typical man of letters. He knew what it meant: being called to knowledge without being born to it. Compelled even to see clearly through the tearful veil of the feelings, to recognize, to notice, to observe, and to lay the observed thing smilingly aside at the very moment when hands are clasping, when lips are meeting, when mortal eyes, blinded by emotion, grow dim⁠—it is disgraceful, Lisaweta, it is despicable, it is revolting⁠ ⁠… but what good is there in being revolted?

“Another, but no less amicable aspect of the matter is, of course, sophistication, indifference, and ironic weariness towards all truth; for it is a fact that nowhere else in the world are things more silenced and hopeless than in a circle of clever people who are already in full rout. All knowledge is old and boring. Pronounce some truth which perhaps has given you a certain youthful delight in its conquest and possession, and they will answer your ordinary enlightenment with a curt release of breath through the nose.⁠ ⁠… Oh, yes, literature makes weary, Lisaweta! In human society it can happen to a person, I assure you, that through sheer scepticism, through leaving his opinions unstated, he can be considered stupid, whereas he was simply haughty and lacking in courage.⁠ ⁠… So much for ‘knowledge.’ But as to the ‘word,’ isn’t it perhaps less a matter of salvation here than a chilling, a putting-on-ice, of the emotions? Seriously, there is an icy and revoltingly arrogant quality to this pat and superficial discharge of emotion through literary speech. If your heart is too full, if you feel yourself moved too much by some sweet or exalted experience: nothing simpler! You go to the man of letters, and everything is settled in the shortest possible time. He will analyse and formulate your affection for you, call it by name, express it and expatiate on it, will relieve you of the whole burden forever, and make you indifferent, and no charges asked. But you will go home relieved, cooled, and enlightened, and will wonder how anything in this matter could have been disturbing you with so sweet a tumult only a short while ago. And you want seriously to defend this cold and vain charlatan? Whatever has been expressed⁠—his credo runs⁠—has been discharged. If the whole world is expressed, then it is discharged, solved, done with.⁠ ⁠… Very good! Yet I am no nihilist⁠ ⁠…”

“You are no⁠—” Lisaweta said.⁠ ⁠… She was holding her spoon full of tea up to her mouth, and became rigid in this position.

“Well, yes⁠ ⁠… well, yes⁠ ⁠… come out of it, Lisaweta! I am not so, I tell you, with reference to living emotion. You see, the man of letters fails at bottom to understand that life may still go on living, that it is not ashamed of this, even after it has been expressed and ‘discharged.’ But see here, it goes on sinning undeviatingly, for all action is sin in the eyes of the mind.⁠ ⁠…

“I am near the end, Lisaweta. Listen to me. I love life⁠—this is a secret. Take it and keep it⁠—I have told it to no one else. People have said, people have even written and had printed, that I hate life, or fear or despise or shun it. I have enjoyed hearing this, it flattered me; but it is no less false for that reason. I love life.⁠ ⁠… You are smiling, Lisaweta, and I know why. But I beg you, don’t think what I am saying now is literature! Don’t think of Cesare Borgia or any drunken philosophy which has that for a slogan! He is nothing to me, this Cesare Borgia; I don’t put the least faith in him, and I will never, never understand how people can honour the extraordinary and the demonic as the ideal. No, ‘life’⁠—as it stands in eternal contrast to the mind and art⁠—not as a vision of bloody greatness and savage beauty, not as the irregular does it present itself to us irregular people; but the normal, the respectable, and the likable are the realm of our yearnings, they are life in all its seductive banality! That man is not an artist for long, my dear, whose last and deepest enthusiasm is for the refined, the eccentric, and the Satanic, who does not know the hankering after the harmless, simple, and living, after a little friendship, devotion, confidence, and human happiness⁠—the stealthy and devouring hankering, Lisaweta, after the bliss of mediocrity!⁠ ⁠…

“A human friend! Will you believe that it would make me proud and happy to possess a friend among human beings? But up to now I have had friends only among demons, goblins, profound sorcerers, and spectres drunk with knowledge, which is to say, among men of letters.

“Occasionally I get on to some platform, find myself in a room facing people who have come to hear me. You see, then it happens that I notice myself looking around among the public, that I catch myself spying secretly through the auditorium, and asking myself, who is it that came to me, whose applause and thanks penetrate to me, with whom does my art I create an ideal union here?⁠ ⁠… I do not find what I am looking for, Lisaweta. I find the herd and the community that is well known to me, a gathering of the first Christians, you might say, people with unwieldy bodies and fine souls, people who always fall down, so to speak⁠—you understand me, Lisaweta⁠—people to whom poetry is a delicate revenge on life; always simply the sufferers and yearners and the poor, and never anyone of those others, the blue-eyed, Lisaweta, who have no need of the mind!⁠ ⁠…

“And, after all, would it not be a regrettable inconsistency to wish that things were different? It is absurd to love life and yet be striving with all your faculties to draw it on your side, to win it over to the delicacies and the melancholies, the entire sickly nobility, of literature. The realm of art is widening on this earth, and the realm of health and innocence is falling away. Whatever is still left, we preserve as carefully as possible, and we should not want to seduce people into poetry who would much rather look at the snapshots in books on horses!

“For, in conclusion⁠—is there anything more miserable to look upon than life when it makes an attempt at art? We artists detest no one more basically than the dilettante, the man in life who thinks that he can also on occasion be an artist. I answer you, this kind of detestation is among my personal experiences. I happen to be out among society in some good house; we are eating, drinking, and chatting, we understand one another perfectly, and I feel cheerful and grateful that I am able to get lost for a while among harmless and regular people as one of them. Suddenly (this has happened to me) an officer rises, a lieutenant, a handsome and sturdy fellow whom I should never have thought capable of an act unworthy of his uniform, and asks in unmistakable words for permission to acquaint us with a short piece of verse which he has written. With a dismayed smile, we grant him this, and he carries out his program; taking a paper which he had up until now kept concealed in his coat pocket, he recites his work, something about music and love, in short, something just as deeply felt as it is ineffectual. But now I ask everyone: a lieutenant! A man of the world! He really didn’t have to do it!⁠ ⁠… Well, it turns out as it has to: long faces, silence, a little trumped-up applause, and the profoundest discomfiture on all sides. The first mental fact I became conscious of is that I feel myself involved in the blame for this disturbance which this unthinking young man has brought upon the company. And undoubtedly I too, in whose trade he has blundered, have mocking and distant glances directed towards me. But the second mental fact consists in this: that this man, for whose habits and character I had just been feeling the noblest respect, suddenly sinks, sinks, sinks in my eyes.⁠ ⁠… I am seized by a charitable sympathy. Along with a few other good-hearted and well-meaning gentlemen, I step up to him and speak to him. ‘My felicitations,’ I say. ‘Lieutenant! What a pleasant gift! No, that was splendid!’ And I just narrowly miss clapping him on the shoulder. But is charity the feeling with which one has to meet a lieutenant?⁠ ⁠… His fault! There he was standing, and in great embarrassment paying for the false notion that one dare pluck one leaf, a single one, from the laurel-tree of art, without giving his life for it. No, I stick by my colleague, the criminal banker.⁠—But don’t you find, Lisaweta, that I have a Hamletic eloquence today?”

“Have you finished now, Tonio Kröger?”

“No. But I shall say no more.”

“And it is enough, too.⁠—Are you waiting for an answer?”

“Do you have one?”

“I should think so.⁠—I have listened to you carefully, Tonio, from beginning to end, and I will give you the answer which fits everything you have said to me this afternoon and which is the solution for the problem that has disturbed you so much. Now then! The solution is this: that you, as you sit there, are quite simply a bourgeois.”

“Am I?” he asked, and collapsed slightly.⁠ ⁠…

“It seems that hits you hard, and it ought to. And for that reason I shall mitigate the sentence a bit, for I can do that: you are a bourgeois on the wrong path, Tonio Kröger⁠—a strayed bourgeois.”

—Silence. Then he stood up decisively and reached for his hat and stick. “I thank you, Lisaweta Iwanowna; now I can go home in comfort. I have been ‘discharged’!”

V

Towards fall Tonio Kröger said to Lisaweta Iwanowna:

“Yes, I am taking a trip now, Lisaweta; I must air myself a bit. I must away, I seek the open.”

“Well, what then, Little Father, does it so please you again to go to Italy?”

“God, forget about Italy, Lisaweta. I am indifferent to Italy even to the point of disdain! It has been a long time since I used to imagine that I belonged there. Art, sweet sensuality.⁠ ⁠… In short, I can’t do it. I renounce it. The whole bellezza makes me nervous. Nor can I stand all these frightfully vivacious people down there with their black animal eyes. These Romans have no conscience in their eyes. No, I’m going to Denmark for a while.”

“To Denmark?”

“Yes, and I promise myself something good from that. It happens that I have never been there, near as I was to the border all during my youth⁠—yet I have always known and loved the country. I surely must get this northern leaning from my father, since my mother was really more for bellezza in so far as she was not indifferent to everything. But take the books that are written up there, these deep, pure, and humoristic books, Lisaweta⁠—for me there is nothing like them, I love them. Take the Scandinavian meals, these incomparable meals which can be managed only in a strong salt air (I don’t know whether I shall still be able to manage them at all) and which I really know something about; for people eat somewhat like that where I come from. Just take the names, the Christian names, which people are graced with up there, and many of which are also used where I come from: a sound like Ingeborg, a harp stroke of the most immaculate poetry. And the sea⁠—they have the Baltic Sea up there!⁠ ⁠… In a word, I am going up for a trip, Lisaweta. I will see the Baltic Sea again, will hear these Christian names again, will read these books on the very spot; also I will stand on the platform of Kronborg, where the ghost came to Hamlet and brought destitution and death upon the poor, noble young man.⁠ ⁠…”

“How are you going, Tonio, if I may ask? What route are you taking?”

“The usual one,” he said with a shrug, and blushed noticeably. “Yes, I shall touch on my⁠—my point of exodus, Lisaweta, after thirteen years; and that can become somewhat comic.”

She smiled.

“That is what I wanted to hear, Tonio Kröger. And so, God be with you. And don’t neglect to write me, do you hear? I look forward to a letter rich in experience from your trip to⁠—Denmark.⁠ ⁠…”

VI

And Tonio Kröger travelled north. He travelled with comfort (for he liked to say that anyone who was so much more disturbed internally than other people had a perfect right to a little external comfort) and he never stopped until the towers of the narrow city from which he had come rose up before him into the grey air. There he made a brief strange stopover.⁠ ⁠…

A melancholy afternoon was already passing into evening when the train pulled into the smoke-filled and wonderfully familiar station; beneath the dirty glass roof the smoke was still gathered in a mass, moving back and forth in long shreds, just as at the time when Tonio Kröger, with nothing but scorn in his heart, had travelled away from here.⁠—He traced his baggage, gave orders to have it taken to the hotel, and left the station.

There stood the city cabs in a row, each black, unusually high and broad, and with its team of horses! He took none of them; he simply looked at them, as he looked at everything: the narrow gables and pointed towers which greeted him above the nearby roofs, the blond and portly people about him with their broad yet rapid manner of speaking⁠—and a nervous laughter arose in him which had some mysterious kinship to a sob. He went on foot, went slowly, the ceaseless pressure of the damp wind in his face, crossed the bridge with its mythological statues standing by the handrail, and walked some distance along by the harbour.

Great God, how tiny and remote it all seemed! Had all these narrow gable-lined streets always been so funny in their steep climb toward the town? The smokestacks and masts of the ships tossed lightly on the melancholy river in the wind and twilight. Should he go up that street, that one there, where the house stood that he had in mind? No, tomorrow. He was so sleepy now. His head was heavy from the trip, and slow clouded thoughts were passing through his mind.

Often during the thirteen years, when his digestion had troubled him, he had dreamed that he was home again in the old echoing house on the steep street, that his father was there too and was hard at him on account of his degenerate manner of living⁠—all of which he had always found quite reasonable. And now this neighbourhood was in no way different from one of those tough, deceiving dream fabrics in which we ask ourselves whether this is delusion or reality, and finally feel compelled to decide definitely for the latter only to awaken in the end.⁠ ⁠… He went through the draughty, almost deserted streets, held his head bent against the wind, and walked like a somnambulist in the direction of the hotel, the first in the city, where he was to pass the night. A bowlegged man, carrying a pole with a little flame at one end, was walking with a rolling sailor’s stride in front of him and lighting the gas lamps.

What was the matter with him? What was all this which, beneath the ashes of his weariness, without breaking in a clear flame, glowed so sombrely and painfully? Silent, silent, and no word! No speech! He would gladly have gone on this way for a long while, in the wind through these twilit, dreamily familiar streets. But everything huddled so narrow and close; one soon reached his destination.

In the upper city there were arc lamps, and they were already lit. There was the hotel, and those were the two black lions which lay in front of it and which he had been afraid of as a child. They were still looking at each other, with an expression as though they were going to sneeze. But they seemed to be much smaller than formerly. Tonio Kröger entered between them.

Since he came on foot, he was received without much ceremony. He was met by the porter and an elegant gentleman in black who did the honours and was always shooting his cuffs back into his sleeves with his little fingers; they eyed him critically and appraisingly from head to foot, visibly struggling to form some idea of him socially, to place him in the bourgeois hierarchy and assign him some notch in their respect. Yet they did not come to any satisfactory conclusion, so that they finally decided on a moderate politeness for him. A waiter, a mild man with whiskers as blond as bread, a swallowtail coat shiny with age, and rosettes on his noiseless shoes, led him up two flights into a clean, old-fashioned room. Beyond the window, in the twilight, he saw spread out the picturesque and medieval view of courts, gables, and the bizarre pile of the church near which the hotel was located. Tonio Kröger stood awhile before this window; then he sat down with folded arms on the expansive sofa, knitted his brows, and whistled to himself.

A light was brought, and his baggage arrived. At the same time the waiter laid the register on the table, and Tonio Kröger, with his head bent sideways, put down something on it which looked like his name, vocation, and residence. Then he ordered a light supper, and continued looking out into the open from his sofa corner. When his meal stood in front of him, he left it for a while untouched, finally took a few bites, and walked up and down the room for another hour, occasionally stopping and closing his eyes. Then he undressed slowly, and went to bed. He had a long sleep, with confused and strangely wistful dreams.

When he awoke, he saw his room filled with bright daylight. He was bewildered, and thought hurriedly where he was; and he arose to open the curtains. The slightly pale late-summer blue of the sky was streaked with strips of cloud torn by the wind; but the sun was shining on his native city.

He gave even more care to his toilet than usual, washed and shaved himself with extra thoroughness, and made himself as fresh and clean as though he were preparing for a visit to some good, correct house where he was supposed to make a tidy blameless impression. And during the operations of dressing he listened to the anxious beating of his heart.

How bright it was out there! He should have felt better if, like yesterday, the streets had lain in twilight. But now he should have to go through the clear sunlight under people’s eyes. Would he run across acquaintances, be stopped, questioned, and have to account for how he had spent these thirteen years? No, thank God, no one knew him any longer; and whoever remembered him would not recognize him, for he had really changed a little in the meantime. He observed himself attentively in the mirror, and suddenly he felt safer behind his mask, behind this face of his which showed the signs of early strain and looked older than his years.⁠ ⁠… He had breakfast brought in, and then went out, beneath the deprecatory glances of the porter and the elegant gentleman in black, through the vestibule, and between the two lions, out into the open.

Where was he going? He hardly knew. It was like yesterday. It was not so much that he saw himself surrounded again by this wonderfully dignified and old, familiar juxtaposition of gables, towers, arcades, wells; not so much that he felt again in his face the pressure of the wind, the strong wind which brought with it a sharp delicate fragrance from disstant dreams; as that his senses seemed obscured as by a veil, a blanket of fog⁠ ⁠… The muscles of his face relaxed; and he observed people and things more quietly. Yet perhaps, there on that street corner, he awoke.⁠ ⁠…

Where was he going? He felt as though the direction which he was taking had some connection with his melancholy and strangely remorseful dreams of the night.⁠ ⁠… He came to the market, passed under the arches of the town hall where butchers were weighing their wares with bloody hands, out on to the marketplace where the Gothic well stood high, complex, and pointed. Then he stopped before a house, a plain narrow house, like many others, with a curved, fretwork gable⁠—and he was lost in the contemplation of it. He read the nameplate on the door, and let his eyes rest for a time on each of the windows. Then he turned slowly to leave.

Where was he going? Home. But he took a roundabout way, went for a walk out beyond the gate, since he had time. He went over the Mill-wall and the Holsten-wall, and held his hat tight from the wind which moaned and whistled in the trees. Then he left the walls near the railroad station, watched a train puffing by in clumsy hastiness, counted the cars for a pastime, and peered after the man who was sitting in the rear of the very last one. And on the Lindenplatz he stopped before one of the pretty villas that stood there, gazed for a long time into the garden and up at the windows; and finally he got the idea of swinging the garden gate back and forth on its hinges, so that it creaked. Then for a time he observed his hand, which was cold and covered with rust, and walked on, walked through the old low gate along the harbour and up the steep windy street to the house of his parents.

It stood, grey and sober as it had been for three hundred years, its gable overtowering the neighbouring houses which surrounded it; and Tonio Kröger read the pious aphorism that stood over the entrance in half-obliterated letters. Then he took a deep breath and entered.

His heart beat anxiously, for he almost expected his father, in his office coat and with his pen behind his ear, to come out through one of the doors on the ground floor as he was passing, stop him, and bring him resolutely to account for his extravagant life⁠—which he would have found very reasonable. But he got by unmolested. The storm door was not closed, but only pushed to, and this seemed reprehensible to him; while at the time he felt like in certain light dreams in which the obstacles give way to us of their own accord, and we press forward unhindered, graced by a marvellous well-being.⁠ ⁠… The broad entrance, paved with large rectangular flagstones, resounded with his steps. Opposite the kitchen, in which all was silent, a scaffolding of ungainly but neatly varnished rafters thrust out from the wall, supporting the servants’ quarters above; these could be reached only by a sort of ladder which led up to them from the passage. But the large closets and the carved chest that had stood here were no longer there.⁠ ⁠… The son of the house mounted the heavy stairs, and supported himself with his hand on the white-enamelled, carved wooden banister, while he pulled himself up at each step and on the next let himself sink down again softly, as though he were testing timidly whether his former intimacy with this old solid handrail could be restored.⁠ ⁠… But on the landing he stopped before the entrance to the entresol. On the door a white placard was fastened, on which he could read in black letters: “Public Library.”

“Public Library?” Tonio Kröger thought, for he found that neither the public nor literature had any business here. He knocked on the door.⁠ ⁠… He heard a “Come in,” and went in its direction. Tense and melancholy, he looked in upon some extremely unsightly alterations.

The floor was three rooms deep, with its connecting doors standing open. The walls were covered almost to the ceiling with uniformly bound books which stood on dark shelves in long rows. In each room an indigent man sat writing behind a kind of counter. Two of them merely turned their heads towards Tonio Kröger, but the first stood up hastily, at the same time supporting himself with both hands on the tabletop, shoving his head forward, pursing his lips, raising his brows, and observing the visitor with diligently blinking eyes.⁠ ⁠…

“Pardon,” Tonio Kröger said, without turning his eyes from the many books. “I am a foreigner here; I am seeing the sights of the town. So this is the Public Library? Would you permit me to look around a bit at the collection?”

“Gladly!” the official said, and blinked still more violently.⁠ ⁠… “Certainly, that is free to everyone. Do you simply want to look around?⁠ ⁠… would you like a catalogue?”

“No, thank you,” Tonio Kröger answered. “I can easily find my way.” Then he began walking slowly along the walls, while he acted as though he were studying the titles on the books. Finally he took down one volume, opened it, and stepped over to the window with it.

This had been the breakfast room. In the mornings they had breakfasted here, not up there in the large dining-hall where the white forms of gods were stepping out of the blue tapestry.⁠ ⁠… That room there had served as a bedroom. His father’s mother had died there, old as she was, amid violent spasms, for she was a pleasure-loving woman of the world and clung to life. And later his father himself had breathed out his last sigh there, the tall, correct, somewhat melancholy and thoughtful gentleman with the wild flower in his buttonhole.⁠ ⁠… Tonio had sat at the foot of his deathbed, with hot eyes, completely and reverently given over to powerful, dumb feelings, to love and pain. And his mother too had knelt by the bed, his beautiful emotional mother, completely lost in hot tears, whereupon she went off into the blue distance with the southern artist.⁠ ⁠… But behind there, the smaller third room, now likewise completely filled with books guarded by an indigent man, had been his for several years. He had returned there after school, after he had taken a walk, as just now; by that wall had stood his table where in the drawer he had kept his first intimate and helpless verses.⁠ ⁠… The walnut-tree.⁠ ⁠… A penetrating sadness shot through him. He looked out sideways through the window. The garden lay in ruins, but the old walnut-tree stood in its place, cumbersomely groaning and moaning in the wind. And Tonio Kröger let his eyes slip back to the book which he held in his hands, a prominent work of poetry well known to him. He looked down at these black lines and groups of sentences, followed the skilful flow of the text for a piece, as it ascended in structural passion to a gesture, a touch and effect, and then broke off tellingly.

“Yes, that is well done,” he said, put down the work of poetry, and turned away. Then he saw that the official was still standing up and blinking his eyes with a mixed expression of officiousness and cautious distrust.

“An excellent collection, as I see,” Tonio Kröger said. “I have already gotten a general idea of it. I am much obliged to you. Goodbye.” Then he went out to the door; but it was a questionable exit, and he felt plainly that the official, disturbed over this visit, would stand there blinking for several minutes.

He felt no inclination to penetrate further. He had been home. Above, in the large rooms beyond the pillared hall, strangers were living⁠—he saw that. For the stairs at the top were closed by a glass door which did not use to be there, and there was some kind of nameplate on it. He went away, went down the stairs, across the echoing vestibule, and left his paternal house. In a corner of a restaurant, retiring to himself, he took a rich heavy meal, and then returned to the hotel.

“I have finished here,” he said to the elegant gentleman in black. “I leave this afternoon.” And he asked for his bill, and also for a cab which would bring him to the harbour and the steamer for Copenhagen. Then he went to his room and sat down at the table, sat still and upright, resting his cheek in his hand and looking down at the tabletop with sightless eyes. Later he settled his account and got ready his things. At the appointed time the cab was announced, and Tonio Kröger descended ready for the trip.

Below, at the foot of the stairs, the elegant gentleman in black was waiting for him.

“Pardon me!” he said, and shot his cuffs back into his sleeves with his little fingers. “Pardon me, sir, if we have to trouble you for a moment. Herr Seehaase⁠—the proprietor of the hotel⁠—requests a brief word with you. A formality.⁠ ⁠… He is in there. Would you be so kind as to come with me?⁠ ⁠… It is only Herr Seehaase, the proprietor of the hotel.”

And with gestures of encouragement he led Tonio Kröger to the rear of the lobby. There, indeed, Herr Seehaase was standing. Tonio Kröger knew him at a glance from old times. He was short, fat, and bowlegged. His trimmed whiskers had become grey; but he was still wearing a much cutaway dress-coat, and a little knitted green velvet cap to match. Furthermore, he was not alone. Next to him, beside a little writing-shelf fastened to the wall, stood a policeman wearing his helmet. His gloved right hand was resting on a paper with writing in different colours which lay before him on the desk; and he stared back with his noble soldierly face, as though he expected that Tonio Kröger would have to sink through the floor at the sight of him.

Tonio Kröger looked from one to the other, and waited for what might happen.

“You come from Munich?” the policeman finally asked in a well-meaning, lugubrious voice.

Tonio Kröger assented to this.

“You are travelling to Copenhagen?”

“Yes, I am en route to a Danish bathing-resort.”

“Bathing-resort?⁠—Yes, you must produce your papers,” the policeman said, pronouncing the “produce” with peculiar satisfaction.

“Papers⁠ ⁠…” He had no papers. He drew out his portfolio and looked in; except for some paper money, there was nothing inside but the proofs of a short story which he intended revising when he reached his destination. He did not like to deal with officials, and had never yet gotten a passport.

“I am sorry,” he said, “but I am carrying no papers with me.”

“So?” the policeman said. “None at all? What is your name?”

Tonio Kröger answered him.

“And is that so?” the policeman asked, straightening up and suddenly extending his nostrils as widely as he could.

“Absolutely so,” Tonio Kröger answered.

“What are you, then?”

Tonio Kröger gulped and named his trade with a firm voice. Herr Seehaase raised his head and looked into his face with curiosity.

“Hm!” the policeman said. “And you admit not being identical with an individual by the name of”⁠—he said “individual,” and then from the paper with different-coloured writing he spelled out a thoroughly intricate and romantic name which seemed adventurously compounded from the sounds of various races, and which Tonio Kröger had forgotten again the next moment⁠—“Who,” he went on, “of unknown parents and uncertain status, is wanted by the Munich police for several fraudulent activities and is probably fleeing to Denmark?”

“I don’t merely admit it,” Tonio Kröger said, with a nervous movement of his shoulders.⁠—That made a certain impression.

“How? Ah, of course! Why, certainly!” the policeman said. “But simply since you couldn’t produce anything!”

Also, Herr Seehaase intervened conciliatingly: “The whole thing is a formality,” he said, “nothing more! You must consider that the officer is simply doing his duty. If you could prove your identity somehow⁠ ⁠… a paper⁠ ⁠…”

All were silent. Should he end the matter by introducing himself, by disclosing to Herr Seehaase that he was no confidence man of uncertain status, was not by birth a gipsy in the green wagon, but the son of Consul Kröger, from the Kröger family? No, he had no desire to do that. And weren’t these burghers somewhat in the right after all? In a way he was quite in sympathy with them. He shrugged his shoulders and remained silent.

“What have you there?” the policeman asked. “There, in the valise?”

“Here? Nothing. It is some proofs,” Tonio Kröger answered.

“Proofs? How is that? Let me see once.”

And Tonio Kröger handed over his work. The policeman spread it out on the desktop and began reading. Herr Seehaase also stepped nearer and joined in the reading. Tonio Kröger looked over their shoulders and observed at what place they were. It was a good moment, a touch and effect, which he had worked out tellingly. He was content with himself.

“See!” he said. “There stands my name. I wrote this, and now it will be published, you understand.”

“Well, that is enough!” Herr Seehaase said decisively; he collected the pages, folded them, and gave them back to him. “That will do, Petersen!” he repeated curtly, shutting his eyes furtively and shaking his head in the negative. “We have no right to detain the gentleman any longer. The cab is waiting. I beg you to forgive the slight inconvenience, sir. The officer simply did his duty, but I told him at the start that he was on the wrong track⁠ ⁠…”

“So?” Tonio Kröger thought.

The policeman did not seem quite agreed. He still put in something about an “individual” and “produce.” But amid repeated expressions of regret Herr Seehaase led his guest back through the lobby, accompanied him between the two lions to the cab, and with assurances of respect shut the door behind him himself. And then the ridiculously high and broad cab rolled swaying, clattering, and banging down the steep streets to the harbour.

This was Tonio Kröger’s strange stopover in his native city.

VII

Night came on, and the moon had already risen in a swimming silver reflection, when Tonio Kröger’s ship reached the open sea. He was standing by the bowsprit, wrapped in his coat against the wind which was growing stronger and stronger; and he looked down into the dark roaming and driving of the strong smooth undulating masses which worked in among one another, slapping together, shooting apart in unexpected directions and suddenly lighting up with foam⁠ ⁠…

He was lulled by a delicious cradling movement. He had been a bit depressed when they had wanted to arrest him as a confidence man in his home town; yes, although he had in a way found it within reason. But then, after boarding the ship, he had watched the loading of the cargo as he used to do with his father during boyhood. The deep hold of the ship was filled, amid cries in a mixture of Danish and Low German. He had seen how, in addition to the bundles and chests, they had also let down in heavily barred cages a polar bear and a royal tiger, which must have come from Hamburg and were destined for a Danish menagerie. And this had distracted him. Then, as the ship was gliding between the even banks of the river, he had entirely forgotten officer Petersen’s cross-examination. And everything that had taken place before that⁠—his sweet, melancholy, and remorseful dreams during the night, the walk he had taken, the sight of the walnut-tree⁠—had become uppermost again in his mind. And now, as the sea was opening out, he saw from a distance the beach where, as a boy, he could hear the dreams of the sea in summer; he saw the glow from the lighthouse, and the lights of the Kurhouse, where he had lived with his parents.⁠ ⁠… The Baltic Sea! He bowed his head against the strong salt wind which came towards him freely and unimpeded, enveloping his ears and evoking a mild vertigo, a faint intoxication: the memory of all evil, of pain and error, of desires and strivings, passed lightly and easily away. And in the swishing, pattering, frothing, and groaning round about him, he seemed to hear the soughing and creaking of the old walnut-tree, the squeaking of a garden gate.⁠ ⁠… It was getting darker and darker.

“The stars, God, jes’ look at the stars!” A voice which seemed to come from the inside of a barrel spoke up suddenly with a sorrowfully chanting intonation. He knew it already. It belonged to a reddish-blond and simply dressed man with red eyelids and the cool damp appearance of a person who had just bathed. At dinner in the saloon he had been Tonio Kröger’s neighbour, and had with timid and retiring movements put away astounding quantities of lobster omelette. Now he was leaning beside him on the railing and looking up at the sky, while he held his chin between thumb and forefinger. Beyond a doubt he was in one of those extraordinary and solemnly meditative moods when the barrier between humans falls away, when the heart opens even to strangers, and the mouth speaks things to which otherwise it would be shyly closed.⁠ ⁠…

“Jes’ look, sir, at the stars. There they stand and twinkle; God knows the whole sky is full, and now I ask you, when we look up and think that many of them must be a hundred times greater than the earth, how do we feel then? We human beings have invented the telegraph and the telephone, and many other triumphs of modernity; yes, that we have. But when we look up there, then we must realize and understand that after all we are nothing but worms, miserable worms and no more⁠—am I right or wrong, sir? Yes, we are worms!” he answered himself and nodded up at the heavens, humble and contrite.

“Oof!⁠—no, that chap has no literature in his carcass!” Tonio Kröger thought, and immediately he recalled something which he had read recently: the essay of a famous French writer on cosmological and psychological questions; it had been a very fine bit of talk.

He gave the young man something like an answer to his deeply felt observation, and then they continued conversing together, while they leaned on the railing and looked out into the tempestuous, turbulently brilliant evening. It turned out that his travelling companion was a young merchant from Hamburg who was spending his vacation on this pleasure trip.⁠ ⁠…

“ ‘You ought,’ he said, ‘to take a little trip on the steamer to Copenhagen,’ says I, and here I am, and so far it is very beautiful. But that about the lobster omelette, that was not right, sir; you shall see, for it will be stormy tonight, the captain told me, and with such a troublesome meal in your stomach, that is no joke.”⁠ ⁠…

Tonio Kröger listened to all this engaging nonsense with a feeling of comfort and friendliness.

“Yes,” he said, “people always eat too heavily up here. That induces laziness and melancholy.”

“Melancholy?” the young man repeated and looked at him disconcertedly. “You must be a foreigner here, sir?” he asked suddenly.⁠ ⁠…

“Oh, yes, I come from quite a distance!” Tonio Kröger answered with a vague parrying movement of his arm.

“But you are right,” the young man said. “God knows, you are right in what you say about melancholy! I am nearly always melancholy, but especially on evenings like this, when the sky is full of stars”; and again he supported his chin between his thumb and forefinger.

“He surely writes verses,” Tonio Kröger thought; “the deeply, nobly felt verses of a merchant.”

The evening was advancing, and the wind had now become so violent that it interfered with their conversation. So they decided to sleep awhile, and they wished each other good night.

Tonio Kröger stretched out on the narrow bed in his cabin, but he found no rest. The strong wind and its pungent smell had strangely aroused him; and his heart was unsteady, as though he were anxiously expecting some new sweet experience. Also he was made acutely sick by the vibration which took place when the ship dropped down the steep hill of a wave and the screw worked convulsively outside the water. He got completely dressed again and came up in the open.

Clouds were racing past the moon. The sea was dancing. No curved and regular waves were advancing in order, but for a great distance, in the pale and flickering light, the sea was lashed into a choppy turmoil; it leaped and sprang up in gigantic pointed flame-like tongues; beside foam-filled chasms it threw out strange jagged forms; and with the strength of enormous arms in mad playfulness it seemed to sling the spray into every wind. The ship was having a hard trip; pounding, tossing, and groaning, it worked its way through the tumult, and often he heard the polar bear and the tiger, who were suffering from the sea voyage, roar from below. A man in an oilskin coat, the cape over his head and a lantern strapped to his body, crossed back and forth on the foredeck, balancing himself painfully with his legs wide apart. But then behind, bent low over the rail, the young man from Hamburg was standing, and he was having a sorry time of it. “God,” he said with a trembling, hollow voice, as he saw Tonio Kröger, “jes’ see once this riot of the elements, sir!” But then he was interrupted and turned away hastily.

Tonio Kröger clung to a taut rope and looked out into this wanton turmoil. A shout pressed up within him, and he seemed as though it would be strong enough to ring out above the storm and the flood; a song to the sea, inspired by love, rang inside him. “Yes, my boyhood’s savage friend, you and I are joined again.⁠ ⁠…” But then the poem was over. It was not finished, was not well-formed, was not calmly rounded out into something solid. His heart was alive.⁠ ⁠…

He stood this way for a long while. Then he stretched out on a bench outside the cabin and looked up at the sky where the stars were flickering. He even slept a little; and when the cold spray shot into his face, it seemed to him in his half-sleep like a caress.

Vertical chalk cliffs, ghostly in the moonlight, hove into sight and came nearer. That was Möen, the island; and again sleep intervened, broken by showers of the salty spray, which hit sharply into his face and made his features stiffen.⁠ ⁠… When he became fully awake it was already day, a chilly light-grey day, and the green sea was smoother. At breakfast he saw again the young merchant, who blushed deeply, probably through shame at having uttered such poetic and unpresentable things in the darkness; he stroked out his little reddish moustache with all five fingers and called out a militarily sharp “good morning,” only to avoid him uneasily from then on.

And Tonio Kröger landed in Denmark. He put up in Copenhagen, and gave tips to everyone who looked as though he expected one. Starting from his hotel room, he wandered around the city for three days while he carried his little traveller’s guide open before him, and conducted himself just like any sightseeing foreigner of the better classes. He observed the King’s New Market and the “Horse” in the centre of it, he looked up respectfully at the columns of the Frue Kirke, he stood a long while before Thorvaldsen’s noble and lovely sculptures, he climbed the Round Tower, saw palaces, and spent two lively evenings in the Tivoli. But this was not all that he saw.

On the houses (they often looked much like the old houses of his native city with the curving fretwork gables) he saw names which were known to him from the old days, seeming to stand for something tender and precious, and always containing something like a reproach, a complaint, a hankering after what was lost. And everywhere, while he breathed in the damp sea air in slow deliberate draughts, he saw eyes as blue, hair as blond, faces of the same form and nature as those he had observed in the strangely troubled and remorseful dreams of the night he spent in his native city. It was possible for some glance on the open street, some ringing word, some burst of laughter to touch him to the quick.

He could not stand it for long in the cheerful city. He was affected by an unrest, sweet and fond, half reminiscence and half expectancy; and along with this came a yearning to be lying quietly somewhere on the beach, free from the necessity of playing the diligently inquisitive tourist. So he boarded another ship, and one dismal day (the sea had turned black) he was sailing northwards along the coast of Seeland toward Helsingör. From here he continued his journey immediately by cab along the boulevard for three-quarters of an hour, always a little above the sea, until he stopped at his real and ultimate destination: a little white beach hotel with the green shutters, standing in the middle of a colony of squat houses, and with its wood-covered tower looking out over the sand and towards the Swedish coast. Here he alighted, took possession of the bright room which was being held in readiness for him, distributed all his belongings, and prepared to live here for a while.

VIII

It was already well on into September. There were no longer many guests in Aalsgaard. At mealtimes in the large, heavy-beamed dining-hall on the ground floor, with its high windows facing the glass veranda and the sea, the proprietress sat at the head of the table. An elderly spinster with white hair, colourless eyes, pinkish cheeks, and an unsteady twittering voice, she was always careful to arrange her red hands to advantage on the tablecloth. There was also a short-necked old gentleman with a steel-grey seaman’s beard and purplish face; he was a fish dealer from the capital, and could speak German. He seemed all choked up and apoplectic, for he breathed in short irregular gasps, and from time to time raised his ringed forefinger to one of his nostrils in order to press it shut and get a little air through the other by blowing violently. Nevertheless he was continually speaking to the bottle of liquor which stood before him at breakfast as well as at dinner and supper. Then too, there were three tall American boys with their guardian or tutor, who adjusted his spectacles in silence and played football with the boys all day. They wore their reddish-yellow hair parted in the middle, and had long motionless faces. “Please give me the Wurst things there,” the one said. “That’s not Wurst, that’s Schinken,” said another; and this was all that either they or the tutor contributed to the conversation. For otherwise they sat there quietly drinking hot water.

Tonio Kröger could not have wished for different table companions. He enjoyed his peace, listened to the Danish gutturals, the sharp and melancholy vowels, in which the fish dealer and the proprietress conversed at times; occasionally he exchanged a brief word with the former over the state of the barometer; then he would rise and pass through the veranda to the beach, where he had already spent long morning hours.

Often it was quiet and summer-like there. The sea lay smooth and inactive, in blue, bottle-green, and pinkish stripes, with silverish glittering reflections of light playing over it. The seaweed was drying into hay in the sunlight, and the jellyfish were evaporating where they lay. It smelled somewhat foul and also somewhat of the tar of the fishing-smack against which Tonio Kröger was leaning as he sat on the sand, turned so that he faced the open horizon and not the Swedish coast. But the soft sea breeze blew fresh and clean across everything.

And grey stormy days came. The waves bent their heads like steers setting their horns to strike, and ran raging against the banks of sand, which were covered with wet glistening seaweed, mussels, and washed-up bits of wood. Between the tenuous wave-hills, the valleys stretched out pale green and foamy beneath the low sky; but there, where the sun stood behind the clouds, a white velvet sheen lay on the water.

Tonio Kröger stood in the wind and noise, sunk in this heavy, drugging tumult which he loved so well. If he turned and walked away, everything around him suddenly seemed quiet and warm. But he knew that behind him was the sea; it called, allured, and greeted him. And he smiled.

He went towards the interior, on meadow paths through the solitude, and soon he was swallowed up in the beach woods which stretched far out over the neighbouring hills. He sat down on the moss, leaning against a tree in such a way that he could see a strip of the sea between the trunks. At times the wind carried to him the sound of the surf, which rang out as though boards were falling upon one another in the distance. The crows cawed above the treetops, hoarse, desolate, and forlorn.⁠ ⁠… He held a book on his knees, but he did not read a line in it. He was enjoying a profound forgetfulness, an untrammelled soaring beyond space and time; and only now and then it seemed as though his heart would be shot through with misery, a brief, piercing sensation of melancholy or remorse which he was too far sunk in indolence to examine for its name and origin.

So passed many a day, he could not have said how many, and he had no desire to know. But there came one on which something happened; it happened while the sun was standing in the sky and people were present, and Tonio Kröger was not so unusually astonished by it.

This day also began with delightful splendour. Tonio Kröger awakened very early and quite suddenly, leaped from his sleep with a faint and indeterminate terror, and thought that he was looking at a miracle, a magic, fairylike illumination. His room, with glass door and balcony fronting on the sound, and divided into living and sleeping-quarters by a thin white gauze curtain, was hung with pale-coloured wallpaper, and provided with light, cheery furniture, so that it always had a bright and friendly look. But now his eyes, heavy with sleep, saw everything lying before him in an unearthly clarity and illumination, all bathed in an unutterably delicate and vaporous rose hue which gilded the walls and furniture and gave the gauze curtain a mild red glow.⁠ ⁠… For a long while Tonio Kröger did not understand what was taking place. But as he stood before the glass door and looked out, he saw that it was the rising sun.

For several days it had been dull and rainy; but now the sky stretched out over the sea and the land, as clear and luminous as taut light-blue silk. Interlaced and bordered by clouds lit up with red and gold, the disk of the sun rose solemnly above the sparkling ruffled ocean, which seemed to tremble and glow beneath it.⁠ ⁠… So the day came on; and, confused and happy, Tonio Kröger jumped into his clothes, breakfasted before all the others below on the veranda, afterwards swam out a ways in the sound from the little wooden bathing-house, and then took an hour’s walk along the beach. As he returned, several omnibus-like wagons were standing in front of the hotel; and from the dining-room he observed, both in the adjoining reception room where the piano stood, and also on the veranda and on the terrace in front of it, numerous people of both sexes, in ordinary middle-class dress. They were in lively conversation, and were sitting at round tables enjoying beer and sandwiches. There were whole families, elderly people and young people, and even a few children.

At the second breakfast (the table was heavily laden with cold foods, smoked, salted, and baked) Tonio Kröger inquired what was going on.

“Guests!” said the fish dealer. “Excursionists from Helsingör who have come here for a ball! Yes, God help us, we won’t be able to sleep this night! There will be dancing, dancing and music, and I am afraid it will keep up for a long while. It is a family gathering, a reunion and trip to the country combined⁠—in short, a subscription ball or something of the sort; and they will be happy as the day is long. They came by boat and by carriage, and now they are having breakfast. After a while they will go further into the country, but in the evening they will come back, and then there will be a dance in the hall here. Yes, damn it all, we won’t sleep a wink⁠ ⁠…”

“That will be pleasant for a change,” Tonio Kröger said.

After this, nothing further was said for quite a while. The proprietress arranged her red fingers, the fish dealer blew through his right nostril in order to get a little air, and the Americans drank hot water and made long faces.

Then of a sudden this happened: Hans Hansen and Ingeborg Holm passed through the room.

Tonio Kröger, pleasantly tired after his bath and his fast walk, was leaning back in his chair eating smoked salmon on toast⁠—he sat facing the veranda and the sea. And suddenly the door opened, and the two came in, hand in hand⁠—sauntering, and without haste. Ingeborg, blonde Inge, was dressed in bright colours, as she used to be at Herr Knaak’s dancing-class. The soft flowery dress reached down to her ankles, and about her shoulders she wore a broad white v-shaped fichu which left her soft pliant neck exposed. Her hat was hanging on her arm by its knotted ribbons. She was perhaps just a little taller than before, and now wore her wonderful plait done up on her head.

But Hans Hansen was just the same as ever. He had on his reefer’s jacket with the gilt buttons, with the broad blue collar lying over it on his back and shoulders. The sailor cap with the short ribbons he held in his loose hand, and was swinging it carelessly back and forth. Ingeborg kept her narrow eyes turned away, perhaps a little embarrassed by the stare of the diners. But Hans Hansen now turned his head straight towards the breakfast table with utter defiance, and his steel-blue eyes measured one person after the other challengingly and with a certain amount of scorn. He even let Ingeborg’s hand go and swung his cap still more briskly back and forth, in order to show just what sort of man he was. So the two of them, with the quiet blue sea as a background, passed before Tonio Kröger’s eyes, went the length of the room, and disappeared through the far door into the music room.

This happened at eleven-thirty in the morning; and while the guests at the Kurhouse were still sitting at breakfast, the company in the adjoining room and on the veranda broke up and left the hotel through the nearby side entrance without anyone’s coming through the dining-hall. They could be heard outside climbing into the wagons amid jokes and laughter; and one vehicle after the other started gratingly along the boulevard and rolled away.⁠ ⁠…

“So they are coming back?” Tonio Kröger asked.⁠ ⁠…

“That they are!” said the fish dealer, “and God have mercy. They have arranged for music, you know, and I sleep here above this room.”

“That will be pleasant for a change,” Tonio Kröger repeated. Then he arose and left.

He spent the day as he spent the others, on the beach, in the woods; held a book on his knees and blinked into the sun. He had only one thought: that they would return and hold a dance in the hall as the fish dealer had promised; and he simply felt happy at this, with a sweet uneasy happiness such as he had not experienced for long dead years. Once, through some association of ideas, he recalled fleetingly a distant acquaintance, Adalbet, the short-story writer, who knew what he wanted and had gone to the café to escape the spring air. And he shrugged his shoulders at him.⁠ ⁠…

Dinner was eaten earlier than usual; and supper likewise they took sooner than ever before, in the music room, since in the hall preparations for the ball were already under way: everything had been plunged into such glorious disorder. Then, when it was dark and Tonio Kröger was sitting in his room, things became lively again on the boulevard and in the house. The excursionists were returning. In fact, from the direction of Helsingör new guests were arriving on bicycles and in wagons; and already he could hear a violin tuning up in the house downstairs, and a clarinet was nasally executing some trial runs.⁠ ⁠… All indications were that it would be a brilliant ball.

Now the little orchestra struck up a march; it carried up to him in a subdued steady rhythm; they were opening the dance with a polonaise. Tonio Kröger sat still for quite a while and listened. But when he heard the march tempo change into a waltz rhythm, he arose and slipped noiselessly out of his room.

From the corridor he could go down the back stairs to the side entrance of the hotel, and from there, without touching a room, reach the glass veranda. He took this route, quietly and stealthily, as though he were on forbidden paths; he felt his way carefully through the darkness, irresistibly drawn by this stupid and soulfully swaying music, whose tones already came to him clear and unsubdued.

The veranda was empty and unlighted, but the glass door was open into the hall, where the two large petroleum lamps with polished reflectors were shining brightly. He crept up softly; his skin tingled with thievish delight as he dared to stand here in the darkness and to spy unseen on her dancing in the light. Hastily and greedily he sent his glances after the two he was seeking.⁠ ⁠…

The general merriment seemed to have developed with perfect freedom, although the festivity had been opened hardly half an hour before. But they had already come here warm and excited, after having spent the whole day together, carefree, happy, and in perfect accord. In the music room, which Tonio Kröger could see into if he ventured a little closer, several elderly gentlemen had gathered at cards, smoking and drinking. But others, with their wives, were sitting in the foreground, on the plush chairs and against the walls of the hall, watching the dance. They spread their knees, and supported their hands on them, and puffed out their cheeks with an expression of well-being, while the mothers, wearing bonnets, their hands crossed beneath their breasts, and their heads bent sideways, were looking into the swarm of young people. A podium had been erected against one of the longer walls of the room, and there the musicians were doing their best. There was even a trumpet here; it blew with a certain cautious hesitancy, as though it were afraid of its own voice, which nevertheless was continually breaking down and tumbling all over itself.⁠ ⁠… The couples undulated, weaving in and out among one another, while others wandered about the room arm-in-arm. No one was dressed for a ball, but only as for some Sunday spent in the country during the summer: the cavaliers in ordinary suits which showed signs of having been spared throughout the week, and the young girls in light and cheerful dresses with bouquets of wild flowers on their bodices. Also a few children were in the room and danced with one another after their fashion, even when the music stopped. A long-legged man in a swallowtailed coat, a provincial lion with eyeglass and singed hair, a postal assistant or something of the sort, and like some fat comic figure out of a Danish novel, seemed to be master of ceremonies and head of the ball. Hurried, sweating, and with his whole soul in the matter, he was everywhere at once, waddling through the room in high importance, stepping forward artistically on the tips of his toes and intricately crossing his feet, which were encased in smooth pointed military boots. He swung his arms in the air, gave orders, called for music, clapped his hands. And through it all, the ribbons of the large variegated bow, which was fastened to his shoulder as a mark of his dignity and towards which he often turned his head lovingly, fluttered irregularly behind him.

Yes, they were there, the two who had passed by Tonio Kröger today in the sunlight; he saw them again, and gasped with pleasure as he caught sight of them both almost simultaneously. Here was Hans Hansen standing quite near him, close by the door. Bent forward a little, with his legs spread, he was carefully eating a large piece of sponge-cake, while holding his open hand beneath his chin to catch the crumbs. And there against the wall sat Ingeborg Holm, blonde Inge, and the assistant was just now waddling up to them, to invite them to the dance by a recherché bow, whereupon he placed one hand on his back and shoved the other gracefully into his bosom; but she shook her head, and made a sign that she was out of breath and would have to rest a little. Then the assistant took a seat next to her.

Tonio Kröger watched them, these two for whom he had suffered love in times past⁠—Hans and Ingeborg. They were not this so much by reason of specific attributes and similarity of dress, as through the identity of race and type, this light, steel-blue-eyed, and blonde-haired sort which created an impression of purity, of serene good nature, and of a modesty at once proud and homely. He looked at them; saw Hans Hansen standing there in his sailor suit as smart and well-formed as ever, broad in the shoulders and small in the hips; saw how Ingeborg laughingly tossed her head to one side with a kind of insolence, how she had a way of touching the back of her head with a not especially slender, not especially delicate girlish hand, so that the light sleeve slipped back from her elbow⁠—and suddenly he was seized with such a painful melancholy that he retired unwittingly into the darkness so that no one might observe the twitching of his face.

“Had I forgotten you?” he asked “No, never! Not you, Hans; nor you, blonde Inge! It was really you I was working for; and if I heard applause, I looked stealthily around me to see whether you had joined in it.⁠ ⁠… Have you read Don Carlos by now, Hans Hansen, as you promised me by your garden gate? Don’t do it! I don’t require it of you any more. What do you care about the king who cries because he is lonesome? You shall not make your bright eyes sad and dreamy from dwelling on verses and melancholy.⁠ ⁠… To be like you! To begin again, grow up like you; be upright, cheerful, and simple; regular, orderly, and on easy terms with God and the world, to be loved by the harmless and the happy, to take you for a wife, Ingeborg Holm, and have a son like you, Hans Hansen⁠—to live free from the curse of knowledge and the pains of creation, to love and praise in blessed mediocrity!⁠ ⁠… Begin again! But it would do no good. Everything would turn out again as it did before. For often people go astray because there simply is no right path for them.”

Now the music was silent; there was a pause, and refreshments were handed around. The assistant in person hurried about among the ladies, serving them from a tray of herring salad. But before Ingeborg Holm he even dropped on one knee as he held out the dish to her, and she blushed with pleasure at this.

Yet by now the people in the hall were beginning to notice the onlooker beyond the glass door; and distant, inquisitive glances from pretty, heated faces were directed towards him. But he held his ground regardless. Also, the eyes of Ingeborg and Hans brushed past him almost at the same moment, with that total indifference which almost has the appearance of disdain. Yet suddenly he became aware that someone’s gaze was penetrating to him and resting upon him. He turned his head, and his eyes immediately encountered those which he had felt were glued upon him. Not far from him a girl whom he had noticed before, with a pale, narrow, and delicate face, was standing. She had not danced much; the cavaliers had not been especially concerned about her; and he had seen her sitting against the wall with firmly compressed lips. She was now standing alone again. She was dressed in bright fragrant garments like the others, but beneath the transparent stuff of her dress her exposed shoulders gleamed frail and angular, and the lean neck was set so deep between the paltry shoulders that the quiet girl seemed almost a bit deformed. She held her hands, which were covered with short flimsy gloves, over her flat breast in such a way that the fingertips met gently. With bowed head, she was looking up at Tonio Kröger through black, swimming eyes. He turned away.⁠ ⁠…

Here, quite near him, Hans and Ingeborg were sitting. He had taken a seat next to this girl who might have been his sister; and, surrounded by other red-cheeked children of mankind, they were eating and drinking, chatting and enjoying themselves, bantering back and forth at one another with ringing voices, and laughing brightly into the air. Could he not approach them a little? Make whatever jovial remark might occur to him, something at least which they would have to answer with a smile? It would make him happy; he yearned to do it; he would then return more contentedly to his room, with the knowledge that he had restored some slight common bond with the two of them. He thought out what he could say, but he did not master the courage to say it. Then too, things must surely be the same as before: they would not understand him, would listen distantly to what he could say to them. For their language was not his language.

Now the dance seemed about to begin again. The assistant developed an all-embracing activity. He bustled about urging everyone to take partners, cleared away chairs and glasses with the help of the waiter, distributed instructions among the musicians, and, grasping the shoulders of clumsy people here and there who didn’t know what to do with themselves, he steered them along in front of him. What was going to be done next? Four by four, pairs were forming into carrés.⁠ ⁠… A terrible recollection made Tonio Kröger blush. They were to dance the quadrille.

The music struck up, and the pairs came together bowing. The assistant gave the command; he gave the command, by God, in French, and he pronounced the nasal sounds in an incomparably distinguished manner. Ingeborg Holm was dancing close by Tonio Kröger, in the carré stationed immediately in front of the glass door. She moved here and there, back and forth, stepping and turning. Often he caught a fragrance which came from her hair or from the delicate stuff of her dress; and he closed his eyes with an emotion which had been so well known to him from of old; all throughout these recent days he had caught faintly its aroma and acrid charm, and now again it filled him with its sweet oppressiveness. Just what was it? Yearning? Tenderness? Envy, self-contempt?⁠ ⁠… Moulinet des dames! Did you laugh, blonde Inge, did you laugh at me, when I danced the moulinet and made such a pitiable ass of myself? And would you laugh again today too, now that I have become something like a famous man? Yes, that you would; and you would be more than right about it! And if I, I all alone, had produced the nine symphonies, The World as Will and Idea, and the Last Judgment⁠—you would have an eternal right to laugh.⁠ ⁠… He looked at her, and he recalled a line of verse which he had not thought of for a long time and yet which had been so close and familiar to him! “I’d like to sleep, but you must dance.” He knew it so well, the melancholically Nordic, profoundly awkward unwieldiness of the emotions which spoke through it. Sleep.⁠ ⁠… To yearn that one might dare surrender simply and wholly to emotions which rest sweetly and indolently within themselves without becoming obligations to act and dance⁠—and yet be forced to dance, to execute nimbly and alertly the trying, trying and precarious knife-dance of art, without ever quite forgetting the humiliating anomaly of this having to dance while one loved.⁠ ⁠…

Suddenly everything dropped into a wild and boisterous movement. The carrés had broken up; and everyone pushed about, leaping and sliding: the quadrille was being ended with a gallop. The couples flew past Tonio Kröger to the mad double-quick beat of the music, with short, breathless laughter, chasséing, overtaking one another. One couple came up, carried along by the general chase, circling, and racing forward. The girl had a pale, delicate face, and thin, overly high shoulders. And suddenly, close in front of him, someone tripped, slipped, and tumbled.⁠ ⁠… The pale girl had fallen down. She fell so hard and violently that it almost looked dangerous⁠—and the cavalier along with her. He must have hurt himself so rudely that he quite forgot his partner; half raising himself, he began grimacing and rubbing his knees with his hands. And the girl, apparently completely dazed by the fall, was still lying on the floor. Then Tonio Kröger stepped forward, grasped her gently by the arms, and lifted her up. Worn out, confused, and unhappy, she looked up at him; and suddenly her delicate face coloured a dull red.

“Tak, O, mange Tak!” she said, and peered up at him with dark, swimming eyes.

“You should not dance any more, Fräulein,” he said softly. Then he looked around him once more in search of them, of Hans and Ingeborg, and went away, left the veranda and the hall, and went up to his room.

He was excited by this festival in which he had taken no part; he was tired out with envy. Like in the past⁠—it had been just like in the past! Hot-faced, he had stood in a dark place in pain over such folk as you, all you blond, vivacious, and happy people; and then had gone off to himself. Someone must come now! Now Ingeborg must come, must notice that he was gone, must follow him stealthily, lay her hand on his shoulder, and say: “Come in with us! Be happy! I love you!”⁠ ⁠… But she did not come at all. Such things never happened. Yes, it was like then, and he was happy as he had been then. For his heart was alive. But what had taken place in the meanwhile, between then and now?⁠—Torpor, desolation, ice, and intellect! And art!⁠ ⁠…

He undressed, lay down to rest, put out the light. He whispered two names into the pillows: these few chaste Nordic syllables which for him meant his true and original mode of love, suffering, and happiness, the deep simple feelings, the home. He looked back over the years between that time and the present. He recalled the arid adventures of sense, nerves, and thought which he had lived through; he saw himself corroded by irony and intellect, devastated and crippled by knowledge, half exhausted by the fevers and chills of creation, bandied about aimlessly, with qualms of conscience, between two crass extremes, between sanctimony and passion, overrefined, impoverished, wearied by cold and choicely aesthetic exaltations, led astray, laid waste, tormented, sick⁠—and he sobbed with regret and melancholy.

It was quiet and dark around him. But from below, subdued and undulating, life’s sweet trivial waltz-rhythm came up to him.

IX

Tonio Kröger was sitting in the north writing to Lisaweta Iwanowna, his friend, as he had promised.

“Dear Lisaweta, down there in Arcadia, where I shall soon return,” he wrote. “This is something in the nature of a letter, but it will disappoint you, for I intend to keep it somewhat general. Not that I have so little to say, or that I haven’t experienced one thing or another after my fashion. At home, in my native city, they even wanted to arrest me⁠ ⁠… but of that you shall hear by word of mouth. Often I have days now when I prefer to say something formal and general, instead of telling stories.

“Do you still know, Lisaweta, that you once called me a bourgeois, a strayed bourgeois? You called me that at a time when, led on by other confessions which I had let out previously, I confessed my love for what I called life. And I wonder whether you really knew how close that came to the truth, how much similarity there is between my bourgeois nature and my love of life. This trip has given me occasion to think over that.

“My father, you know, was a Nordic temperament; thoughtful, thorough, puritanically correct, and inclined to melancholy; my mother, of indeterminate exotic blood, beautiful, emotional, naive, at once indolent and passionate, and of an impulsive negligence! Beyond all doubt this was a mixture which contained extraordinary possibilities⁠—and extraordinary dangers. The result was this: a bourgeois who strayed into art, a Bohemian who yearns for the nursery, an artist with a bad conscience. For it is certainly my bourgeois conscience which permits me to see something profoundly unsteady, ambiguous, profoundly obnoxious, profoundly questionable in everything artistic, everything unusual, everything with genius; and which fills me with this fond weakness for the simple and good-hearted and comfortably normal, for respectability and the absence of genius.

“I stand between two worlds; I am not at home in either of them, and consequently I find things a bit different. You artists call me a bourgeois, and the bourgeois are tempted to arrest me.⁠ ⁠… I do not know which of the two distress me more bitterly. The bourgeois are stupid; but you devotees of beauty who characterize me as phlegmatic and without longing should consider that there is a kind of artistry so deep, so thorough and unescapable, that no longing seems sweeter to it or more desirable than the longing for the bliss of mediocrity.

“I admire the proud and the cold who adventure on the paths of the great demonic beauty, and scorn ‘man’⁠—but I do not envy them. For if anything is capable of making a poet out of a literary man, then it is this bourgeois love of mine for the human, the vivacious, and the ordinary. All warmth, all kindness, all humour derive from this; and it almost seems to me as though it were that very love of which it is written: One can talk with the tongues of men and angels, and yet words without this love would be a mere resounding brass, a ringing shell.

“What I have done is a trifle, not much, as good as nothing. I will do better, Lisaweta; that is a promise. As I write, the sound of the sea reaches me, and I close my eyes. I look into an unborn and capricious world that wants ordering and shaping; I see the confused shadows of human forms signalling me to call them up and release them: tragic ones, and ridiculous ones, and some that are both at once⁠—and to these I am very attached. But my deepest and most secret love belongs to the blond and the blue-eyed, the keenly vivacious, the happy, the amicable, and the ordinary.

“Do not find fault with this love, Lisaweta; it is good and fruitful. There is longing in it, and brooding envy, and just a little disdain, and a very shy happiness.”