And he forsook his zigzagging native city, around whose gables the damp winds whistled, forsook the fountain and the old walnut-tree in the garden, the familiars of his youth, forsook also the sea that he loved so dearly, and felt no pain in so doing. For he had grown mature and shrewd, had come to comprehend how things stood with himself, and was full of mockery of the stupid and vulgar existence that had so long held him in its midst.

He surrendered himself wholly to the power which seemed to him the most lofty on earth, into whose service he felt himself called, and which promised him rank and honors, the power of the spirit and of speech, which sits smilingly enthroned over this unconscious and mute life. With all his young passion he surrendered himself to her, and she rewarded him with all she has to bestow, and took from him inexorably all that she is wont to take as equivalent.

She sharpened his eyes and made him see through and through the big words that swell men's bosoms, she unlocked for him the souls of men and his own soul, made him a seer, and showed him the heart of the world and every first cause hidden behind words and deeds. But what he saw was this: comedy and misery--comedy and misery.

Then came loneliness with the anguish and the arrogance of this knowledge, because he could not endure the circle of the innocent with their happily beclouded minds, and the mark on his brow was disconcerting to them. But sweeter and sweeter grew to him the joy in words and in beautiful forms, for he was wont to say (and had already written it down) that mere knowledge of the soul would infallibly make us dejected if the pleasure of expression did not keep us awake and lively....

So he lived in great cities and in the South, from whose sunshine he promised himself a more luxuriant maturing of his art; and perhaps it was the blood of his mother that drew him thither. But as his heart was dead and without love, he fell into adventures of the flesh, sank deeply into lust and the guilt of passion, and suffered unspeakably from it all. Perhaps it was the heritage of his father in him, of that tall, meditative, neatly dressed gentleman with the wild flower in his button-hole, that made him suffer so down yonder, and that occasionally set in motion within 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 in a green wagon to start with ...

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, and for the rest goes about in unobtrusive gray like an unpainted actor who is nothing so long as he has no part to play. He worked in mute isolation, excluding and despising those petty ones who used their talent as a social ornament, who either went about in barbarous raggedness, whatever the state of their fortunes, or else were extravagant in "personal" cravats; whose foremost thought was to live happily, amiably, and artistically, ignorant of the fact that good works can only originate under the pressure of an evil life, that he who, lives does not work, and that one must have died in order to be altogether a creator.

IV

"Do I disturb you?" asked Tonio Kröger on the threshold of the studio. He was holding his hat in his hand, and even bowed slightly, although Lisaveta Ivanovna was his close friend, whom he told everything.