The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries Volume Xix Part 29

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 l.u.s.t and the guilt of pa.s.sion, 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 b.u.t.ton-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 cra.s.s 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 Kroger, 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 ba.n.a.l, 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 a.s.sociated 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 un.o.btrusive 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 Kroger 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.

"Take pity on me, Tonio Kroger, and come in without ceremony," she replied with her frisking intonation. "It is no secret that you have enjoyed a good bringing up and know what is proper." Whereat she thrust her brush into her left hand beside the palette, extended her right to him, and looked into his face with a laugh and a shake of the head.

"Yes, but you are working," he said. "Let me see ... Oh, you have made progress." And he surveyed in turn the colored sketches leaning against chairs on either side of the easel, and the great canvas covered with a network of squares, on which the first spots of color were beginning to appear in the confused and shadowy charcoal sketch.

It was in Munich, in a rear building on Sch.e.l.ling Street, up several nights of stairs. Outside, behind the broad north window, there was the blue of the sky, the twitter of birds, and sunshine; and the young, sweet breath of spring streaming in through an open trap-door mingled with the odor of fixative and oil-paint that filled the large work-room. Un.o.bstructed, the golden light of the bright afternoon flooded the s.p.a.cious bareness of the studio, shone frankly on the somewhat damaged floor, the rude table under the window covered with bottles, tubes, and brushes, and the unframed studies on the unpapered walls; shone on the screen of tattered silk which stood near the door and shut off a small corner, tastefully furnished as a living-room and rest-room, shone also on the nascent work on the easel and the painter and the poet before it.

She might have been about as old as he, that is, a little past thirty.

She sat on a low foot-stool in a dark-blue paint-spotted ap.r.o.n-dress, resting her chin on her hand. Her brown hair, tightly combed and already turning gray on either side, covered her temples in soft waves and supplied the frame for her dark Slavic face, infinitely appealing in its expression, with a pug-nose, sharply prominent cheek bones, and small, glittering black eyes. Expectant, distrustful, and as it were irritated, she squinted askance at her work ...

He stood beside her, his right hand on his hip, his left rapidly twisting his brown moustache. His slanting eyebrows showed a gloomy and strained agitation, while he softly whistled to himself, as usual. His attire, most carefully selected and in excellent taste, was a suit of quiet gray and of conservative cut. But in his work-lined brow, above which his dark hair was so very simply and correctly parted, there was a nervous quiver, and the features of his Southern countenance were already sharply marked, as if a hard burin had gone over them and brought them into higher relief, whereas his mouth seemed so soft in outline, his chin so gently formed ... After a time he drew his hand over brow and eyes and turned away.

"I ought not to have come," he said.

"Why not, Tonio Kroger?"

"I have just got up from my work, Lisaveta, and the inside of my head looks exactly like your canvas. A framework, a dim sketch soiled with alterations, and a few dabs of color, to be sure; and now I come here and see the same. And the conflict and contrast that tormented me at home I find here too," and he sniffed the air. "It is strange. If an idea gains control of you, you will find it expressed everywhere, you will actually smell it in the wind. Fixative and the aroma of spring, isn't that it? Art and--well, what is the other? Do not say 'Nature,'

Lisaveta, 'Nature' does not exhaust it. Oh, no, I think I ought rather to have gone walking, although it is a question whether I should have felt any better: five minutes ago, not far from here, I met a colleague, Adalbert the novelist, and he said in his aggressive way, 'd.a.m.n the spring! It is and always will be the most horrible season.

Can you lay hold of one sensible idea, Kroger, can you work out the tiniest point or effect with any calmness, when you are feeling an indecent p.r.i.c.kling in your blood and are upset by a whole ma.s.s of irrelevant sensations which so soon as you test them are unmasked as unmistakably trivial and wholly unusable stuff? As for me, I am going to the cafe now. That is neutral ground, untouched by the change of seasons, you see; it represents, so to speak, the remote and elevated sphere of the literary, where one is capable of none but distinguished ideas ...' And he went to the cafe, and perhaps I ought to have gone along."

Lisaveta was amused.

"That is good, Tonio Kroger. That about 'indecent p.r.i.c.kling' is good.

And in a way he is right, for spring is really not a specially good time to work. But now listen to me. Now I am going to do this little thing just the same, to make this little point and effect, as Adalbert would say. Afterward we'll go into the drawing-room and drink some tea, and you will unburden yourself; for I can see well enough that you are loaded today. Until then you will group yourself anywhere, for example on that box yonder, if you are not afraid for your patrician garments."

"Oh, let me alone about my garments, Lisaveta Ivanovna! Would you want me to run around in a torn velvet jacket or a red vest? Inwardly an artist is only too much of an adventurer. Outwardly he ought to dress well, devil take it, and behave like a decent person ... No, I'm not loaded," he said, watching her prepare a mixture on her palette. "You heard me say that it was a problem and a contrast that is on my mind and that disturbed me at my work ... What were we saying just now? Oh, Adalbert the novelist, and what a proud and substantial fellow he is.

'Spring is the most horrible season,' he said, and went to the cafe.

For a man must know what he wants, mustn't he? You see, the spring makes me nervous too, I too am upset by the charming triviality of the recollections and sensations which it awakens; only that I cannot bring myself to the point of chiding and scorning the spring for it; for the fact is that I am ashamed before it, ashamed before its pure naturalness and its victorious youth. And I do not know whether to envy or to despise Adalbert for not knowing anything of this ...

"We do work badly in the spring, certainly, and why? Because we feel.

And because that man is a duffer who thinks the creative artist is allowed to feel. Every genuine and sincere artist smiles at the naivete of this bungler's error--sadly perhaps, but he does smile. For what one says must of course never be the first consideration, but the ingredients, indifferent in themselves, from which the esthetic product is to be put together with easy, calm mastery. If you care too much about what you have to say, if your heart beats too warmly for it, you can be sure of a complete fiasco. You become emotional, you become sentimental; something unwieldy, awkwardly serious, uncontrolled, unironical, unspiced, tedious, or ba.n.a.l takes form under your hands, and the end is simply indifference in your public, simply disappointment and lamentation in yourself ... For so it is, Lisaveta: feeling, any warm, hearty feeling is always ba.n.a.l and unusable, and only the irritations and the cold ecstasies of our demoralized, of our artistic nervous system are useful in art. It is necessary that one should be something superhuman and inhuman, that one should have a strangely distant and uninterested relation to everything human, in order to be able or even tempted to play life, to play with it, to represent it effectively and tastefully. The talent for style, form, and expression presupposes this cool and fastidious relation to things human, and even a certain impoverishment and stagnation of the artist.

For every healthy and strong emotion, that is beyond doubt, is tasteless. The artist is done for so soon as he becomes a man and begins to feel. Adalbert knew that, and that is why he went to the cafe, off to the remote sphere, yes indeed."

"Well, G.o.d be with him, Batushka," said Lisaveta, washing her hands in a tin basin; "you don't have to follow him."

"No, Lisaveta, I will not follow him, but only for the reason that I am now and then able to be a little ashamed before the spring-time of my artistry. You see, at times I get letters from unknown hands, letters of praise and thanks from my public, admiring apostrophes from affected readers. I read these and am myself touched in view of the warm and inarticulate human feeling which my art has aroused in these people; a kind of sympathy comes over me at the naive enthusiasm which the letters utter, and I blush at the thought of how it would sober these honest folk if they could ever cast a glance behind the scenes, if their innocence could ever comprehend that an honest, healthy, and decent human being never writes, acts, or composes ... all of which does not prevent me of course from using their admiration of my genius to strengthen and stimulate myself, that I take it with the gravest seriousness, and put on a face like that of an ape pretending to be a big man ... Now don't put in your oar, Lisaveta! I tell you I am often weary to death of depicting things human without having any share in them ... Is an artist a man, anyhow? Let some one ask 'woman' that question. It seems to me that we artists all share a little the fate of those eunuchs that used to sing for the Pope ... Our singing is touchingly beautiful. And yet--"

"You ought to be a little ashamed, Tonio Kroger. Now come and have tea.

The water will boil directly, and here are cigarettes. You were speaking of sopranos when you stopped; go right on from there. But ashamed you ought to be. If I did not know with what pride and pa.s.sion you are devoted to your calling ..."

"Say nothing about a 'calling,' Lisaveta Ivanovna. Literature is not a calling, but a curse--let me tell you that. When does this curse begin to be perceptible? Early, terribly early. At a time when by rights one ought still to be living in peace and harmony with G.o.d and the world.

You begin to feel yourself marked out, to feel yourself in a mysterious antagonism to other men, to every-day and decent men, and the abyss of irony, unbelief, opposition, knowledge, and feeling which cuts you off from the world yawns deeper and deeper; you are lonely, and from then on all possibility of understanding is over. What a fate! Suppose your heart sufficiently alive, sufficiently affectionate still, to feel it a terrible one ... Your self-consciousness takes fire, because you among thousands feel that your brow bears the mark and that it escapes no one, I knew an actor of genius who as a man had to struggle with morbid embarra.s.sment and instability. His over-sensitive ego-feeling, together with a lack of parts to play, of histrionic activity, had that effect upon this perfect artist and impoverished human being ... An artist, a real one, not one whose official profession is art, but a predestined and pre-condemned artist, you can pick out of a thousand men, with a little sharpness of sight. The feeling of separation and of non-membership, of being recognized and observed, is in his face, something at once regal and perplexed. In the features of a prince walking in ordinary clothes through a crowd one can see something similar. But here no ordinary garb does any good, Lisaveta. Disguise yourself, mask yourself, dress like an attache or like a lieutenant of the Guard on leave: you will scarcely need to lift your eyes and utter a word before every one will know that you are not a man, but something strange, something that estranges, that is different ...

"But _what_ is the artist? Toward no question has mankind's indolence and inertia of discernment proved more unyielding than toward this one.

'Such things are a gift,' humbly say the good people who are under the influence of an artist, and because cheerful and exalted effects, according to their good-natured view, must quite inevitably have cheerful and exalted origins, n.o.body suspects that we may perhaps have here a most questionable 'gift,' most evilly conditioned ... It is known that artists are over-sensitive--well, it is also known that this is not the case with people of good conscience and well-founded self-esteem ... You see, Lisaveta, at the bottom of my soul--translated into the intellectual--I have all the suspicion of the artist _type_ with which each one of my honorable forefathers up yonder in that cramped city would have encountered any charlatan or adventurous 'artist' that might have entered his house. Listen to this. I know a banker, a gray-haired business man, who possesses the ability to write stories. He makes use of this talent in his hours of leisure, and his things are sometimes quite excellent. Despite--I say 'despite'--this sublime talent, this man's record is not wholly stainless; on the contrary, he has already had to serve a long term in prison, and for valid reasons. Indeed it was really in prison that he first became aware of his ability, and his experiences as inmate of the jail form the fundamental theme in all his writings. One might infer from this, with a little boldness, that it is necessary to be at home in some sort of a penal inst.i.tution in order to become a poet. But does not the suspicion arise that his experiences as convict may have been less intimately interwoven with the roots and origins of his artistry than what made him one--? A banker who writes stories is a curiosity, isn't he? But a non-criminal, honest banker of clean reputation who should write stories,--_there is no such thing_ ... Yes, now you are laughing, and still I am only half joking. No problem, none in the world, is more tormenting than that of artistry and its effect on humanity. Take that most extraordinary creation of the most typical and hence mightiest artist, take so morbid and deeply ambiguous a work as _Tristan and Isolde_, and observe the effect this work has upon a young, healthy man with strongly normal feeling. You see elevation, invigoration, warm and honest enthusiasm, perhaps stimulation to some 'artistic' creation of his own ... The good dilettante! Our hearts look very different from what he dreams, with his 'warm heart' and 'honest enthusiasm.' I have seen artists surrounded by adoring women and shouting youths, whereas I knew about them ... One constantly has the most peculiar experiences with regard to the origin, the co-phenomena, and the conditions of artistry ..."

"In others, Tonio Kroger--excuse me--or not only in others?"

He was silent. He drew his slanting eyebrows together and whistled to himself.

"Let me have your cup, Tonio. It is not strong. And take a fresh cigarette. And anyway, you know quite well that you look at things as they don't necessarily have to be looked at."

"That is Horatio's answer, dear Lisaveta. ''Twere to consider too curiously, to consider so,' am I not right?"

"I say that one can consider them just as curiously from another side, Tonio Kroger. I am simply a stupid, painting female, and if I can make any answer to you at all, if I can take the part of your own calling to protect it a little against you, it is surely nothing new that I am advancing, but only a reminder of what you yourself know quite well ...

What then: the purifying, sanctifying power of literature; the destruction of pa.s.sion by the agency of knowledge and speech; literature as the road to understanding, to forgiveness, and to love; the redeeming power of language; literary intellect as the n.o.blest phenomenon of all human intellect whatsoever; the writer as perfect man, as saint;--if one considered things so, would that be not considering them curiously enough?"

"You have a right to speak so, Lisaveta Ivanovna, and especially in view of the work of your poets, and that worship-deserving Russian literature which does really and truly represent the sacred literature you name. But I have not overlooked your objections, nay, they are a part of what is on my mind today ... Look at me. I do not look immoderately cheerful, do I? A little old and sharp-featured and weary?

Well, to come back to 'knowledge,' a man might be imagined, originally unsceptical, long-suffering, well-meaning, and a little sentimental, who would simply be ground to powder and wrecked by psychological clearness of vision. Not to let yourself be overcome by the sadness of the world; to observe, mark, and insert everything, even the most anguishing things, and for the rest be of good courage, even though in the full grasp of moral superiority over that horrible invention, Life--aye, to be sure! Yet at times things get away from you a bit despite all the pleasures of Expressing. Does understanding everything mean forgiving everything? I don't know. There is something that I call the loathing of perception, Lisaveta: a state in which a man only needs to see through a thing in order to feel nauseated to the point of dying (and by no means put into a reconciled mood)--the case of Hamlet the Dane, that most typical man of letters. He knew what it means to be called upon to know without being born to it. To see clearly even through the tear-woven veil of emotion, to recognize, mark, observe, and be obliged to thrust aside one's perceptions with a smile at the very moment when hands clasp each other, lips meet, and when eyes grow dim, blinded with deep feeling--it is infamous, Lisaveta, it is vile, revolting ... but what good in revolting?

"Another side of the matter, but not less admirable, is then of course a blase, indifferent, and ironically weary att.i.tude toward all truth, and it is a fact that there is nothing on earth stupider or more hopeless than a circle of brilliant people who are already up to every dodge in the world. All knowledge is old and tedious. Utter a truth in whose conquest and possession you perhaps have a certain youthful joy, and your vulgar enlightenment will be answered by a very brief emission of air through the nose ... Ah yes, literature wearies, Lisaveta! I a.s.sure you, it can come to pa.s.s in human society that sheer scepticism and continence of opinion make you seem stupid, whereas you are only proud and discouraged ... So much for 'knowledge.' As for 'speech,'

that is perhaps less a matter of redemption than of taking a feeling and putting it on ice. Seriously, there is an icy and revolting presumption in this prompt and superficial dispatching of emotion by means of literary speech. If your heart is too full, if you feel yourself too greatly stirred by some sweet or exalted experience, what could be simpler?--you go to the poet, and everything is regulated in the shortest time. He will a.n.a.lyze and formulate your affair for you, name and utter it and make it talk, relieve you of the whole thing, and make it indifferent to you for all time and accept no thanks for it.

And you--you will go home relieved, cooled, and clarified, and wonder what there was in the matter that only a moment before could perplex you with so sweet a tumult. And would you seriously stand up for this cold and vain charlatan? What is uttered, so runs his confession of faith, is settled. If the whole world is put into speech, it is settled, redeemed, done away with ... Very good. Yet I am no nihilist ..."

"You are no--" said Lisaveta. She was just holding a spoonful of tea near her mouth, and stayed so as if paralyzed.

"Why yes ... why yes ... come to your senses, Lisaveta. I am not that, I say, as far as living emotion is concerned. You see, the man of letters fails to understand, after all, that life still likes to go on living, that it is not ashamed of living after it _has_ been put into words and 'redeemed.' Lo and behold, it keeps on sinning unflinchingly despite its redemption at the hand of literature; for all action is sin in the eyes of the mind ...

"I am ready to make my point, Lisaveta. Listen to me. I am a lover of life--this is a confession. Take it and keep it, for I never made it to any one else. They say, they have actually written and printed it, that I hate or fear or despise or loathe life. I have liked to hear that, for it flattered me; but it is none the less false. I love life ... You smile, Lisaveta, and I know why. But I conjure you, do not regard what I am just saying as literature. Do not think of Cesar Borgia or of any drunken philosophy that elevates him to its escutcheon. He is nothing to me, this Cesar Borgia. I have the poorest possible opinion of him, and I shall never in my life understand how men can revere the extraordinary and the demoniacal as an ideal. No, 'life,' standing as it does in eternal contrast to intellect and art--not as a vision of b.l.o.o.d.y greatness and barbarous beauty, not as the unusual does it appear to us unusual men; on the contrary, the normal, decorous, and amiable are the realm of our longing, and these are life in its seductive ba.n.a.lity. That man is far from being an artist, my dear, whose ultimate and deepest pa.s.sion is the exquisite, eccentric, and satanic, who knows no yearning for the innocent, simple, and vital, for a little friendship, devotion, familiarity, and human happiness--the furtive and consuming yearning, Lisaveta, for the raptures of the commonplace.

"A human friend! Will you believe that it would make me proud and happy to possess one friend among human beings? But so far I have had friends only among demons, goblins, deep-souled monsters, and spirits mute with knowledge: that is, among men of letters.

"At times I get on to some platform or other, find myself in a hall face to face with people who have come to listen to me. Do you know that I often watch myself surveying the audience, and catch myself stealthily looking around with the question in my heart: who is it that has come to me, whose applause and thanks are reaching me, with whom will my art procure me an ideal union here? ... I do not find what I seek, Lisaveta. I find the flock and the congregation that are familiar to me, a gathering of the early Christians, as it were: people with awkward bodies and fine souls, people who are always falling down, so to speak--you understand--and for whom poetry is a gentle vengeance upon life; never any but sufferers, yearners, paupers, never one of those others, the blue-eyed ones, Lisaveta, who have no need of intellect!...

"And in the last a.n.a.lysis, would it not show a lamentable lack of logic, if one were glad to have it otherwise? It is inconsistent to love life, and none the less to endeavor constantly with every possible device to drag it over to your side, to win it over to the finesses and melancholies, the entire diseased n.o.bility of literature. The realm of art is waxing, and that of health and innocence is waning on earth. One should preserve as carefully as possible the little that is left of it, nor try to seduce into poetry those who much prefer to read books about horses with instantaneous photographs in them.

"For, after all, what sight is more pitiful than life making an attempt at art? We artists despise no one more thoroughly than the dilettante, the red-blooded man, who thinks he can be an artist occasionally and on the side. I a.s.sure you, this kind of disdain is one of my own most personal experiences. I find myself in company in an aristocratic house, we eat, drink, and converse, and understand each other perfectly, and I feel glad and grateful to be able to disappear for a time among harmless and regular people as a normal man.

Suddenly--this has happened to me--an officer rises, a lieutenant, a handsome, well-built fellow, of whom I should never have suspected an action unworthy of his honorable dress, and begs in unambiguous words for permission to communicate to us a few verses which he has manufactured. With a smile of consternation the permission is given him, and he carries out his purpose, reading his composition from a slip of paper which he has till then kept hidden in his coat-tail,--something about music and love;--in short, as deep in feeling as it is ineffective. Now in the name of all the world: a lieutenant! One of the lords of the earth! _He_ surely doesn't need it!... Well, the result is inevitable: long faces, silence, a little artificial applause, and the profoundest discomfort round about. The first spiritual fact of which I become conscious is that I feel myself an accomplice in the upsetting of the company by this indiscreet young man; and sure enough: I too, upon whose province he has encroached, catch glances of mockery and scepticism. But the second fact is that my opinion of this man, for whose whole being I had just felt the most honest respect, suddenly falls, falls, falls ... A compa.s.sionate benevolence seizes me. With other courageous and good-natured gentlemen I step up to him and encourage him. 'Congratulations,' I say, 'what a delightful talent! Really, that was most charming.' And I am not far from clapping him on the shoulder. But is benevolence the feeling that one should have toward a lieutenant? ... His own fault! There he stood and in great embarra.s.sment atoned for the erroneous idea that one may pluck a leaf, just one, from the bay-tree of art, without paying for it with one's life. No, there I agree with my colleague, the criminal banker. But tell me, Lisaveta, don't you think I am endowed with the eloquence of a Hamlet today?"

"Are you through now, Tonio Kroger?"

"No. But I will say no more."