Page:German Classics of The 19h and 20th C. Vol.19.djvu/279

 him a faint, yearning recollection of a pleasure of the spirit, which had once been his own, and which he could not find again in all his pleasures.

A loathing and a hatred of the senses seized him, and a thirst for purity and decency and peace; while after all he was breathing the air of art, that lukewarm, sweet air of an eternal spring, pregnant with fragrance, in which a mysterious procreative rapture seethes and germinates and sprouts.

So the only result was that Tonio, without support between these crass extremes, tossed back and forth between icy intellectuality and consuming sensual fire, led an exhausting life amid torments of conscience, an exquisite, debauched, extraordinary life, which he, Tonio Kröger, abhorred in his heart. What vagaries, he thought at times. How was it ever possible that I should fall into all these eccentric adventures? After all, I was no gipsy inagreenwagontostartwith &hellip;

But in the same measure that his health was undermined, his artistry grew keener, becoming fastidious, exquisite, precious, delicate, irritable toward the banal, and most sensitive in matters of tact and taste. When he first came forward, there was much noise of approval and joy among those concerned, for what he had produced was a thing full of valuable work, of humor, and of acquaintance with suffering. And his name, the same name that his teachers had once used to reprove him, the same name that he had signed to his first rhymes to the walnut-tree, the fountain, and the sea, this mixture of north and south, this plebeian name with the exotic flavor, swiftly became the standing symbol of excellence; for with the painful thoroughness of his experience became associated a rare, tenacious, and ambitious industry, whose struggle with the finical sensitiveness of his taste produced, amid exquisite torments, unusual works.

He did not work like one who works to live, but like one who desires nothing but work, because he counts the living man as nothing, only wishes to be considered as a creator,