Chapter 2

The author of the articulate and powerful epic prose poem about the life of Frederick the Great; the patient artist, who had industriously weaved the tapestry called "Maja", a novel rich in characters that combined so much human fatefulness under the overruling shadow of an idea; the creator of that mighty narrative titled "A Miserable One" that demonstrated to a thankful generation the possibility of moral resoluteness in the presence of deepest knowledge; the writer, finally, (and that concludes the list of works of his most mature period) of the impassioned treatise about "Arts and the Intellect", which due to its organizing force and antithetical eloquence could be compared to Schiller's reasoning about naive and sentimental poetry: Gustav Aschenbach had been born as the son of judicial officer in the district town of L. in Silesia. His ancestors had been officers, judges, and bureaucrats, men who in the service of king and country had led their strict and decently simple lives. Intellectual tendencies had once taken shape among them in the form of a preacher; quicker, more sensual blood had been added through the poet's mother, daughter of a Bohemian bandmaster. From her the characteristics of a different race in his appearance had been derived. That marriage between businesslike, spartan sedulity and darker, more fiery impulses had created an artist, and this artist in particular. Since his entire persona had a disposition towards fame, he, even though not really precocious, had presented himself from an early age on with maturity and skill, thanks to his decisiveness and laconic use of words. Still little more than a student, he had already made a name for himself. Ten years later he had learned to represent from his desk, to administrate his fame in concise letters (because the one who is successful and trustworthy is met with many demands every day), and to be generally benevolent and meaningful. Even in his forties he had had, already exhausted from the strains and vicissitudes of his actual work, to cope with a daily correspondence bearing postage stamps from all over the world.

Keeping equal distance from the banal and the eccentric, his gifts were made to win the fidelity of the masses and the adulating, demanding participation of the more discriminating at the same time. In that way, from his adolescent years having been prepared for extraordinary achievement from all sides, he had never known the idleness and carelessness of youth. When he fell sick in Vienna around his thirty-fifth year, are careful observer said of him: "See, Aschenbach has always lived like this" — and he formed a fist with his left hand — "but never like that" — and he let his now-open hand drop nonchalantly from the armrest of his lounge chair. That was indeed true; and the brave thing about it was that his nature was not at all robust and had been made to yield to frequent concentrated effort only by calling, not by birth.

The doctor had demanded that the boy stay home from school and instead advised that he be schooled at home. He had grown up solitary, without comrades and had to recognize in due time that he belonged to a family in which not so much the talent but the necessary physical basis which talent needs to unfold had been a rarity — a family in which the capable gave all their gifts early on and infrequently reached old age. But his favorite phrase was "keep a stiff upper lip" — in his novel about Frederick the Great he saw nothing less than the apotheosis of that command, which he considered the essence of virtue at work. He also wished mostly dearly to live a long life, because he had always though that an artist could only be considered truly great and honorable if he had been a success in all stages of his life.

Therefore, since he had to carry the duties which his gifts burdened him with on tender shoulders and intended to go a long way, discipline was most important to him — fortunately, that kind of discipline had been running in his father's side of the family. At forty or fifty years, at an age when others are still wasteful and enthusiastic and delay the carrying out of bigger designs, he started his day by dousing his breast and back with cold water and then sacrificed the creative impulses he had gathered during his slumber during two or three hours of intensive work in the candlelight. It was pardonable, and even signified the victory of his morality when those without more intimate knowledge considered the world of "Maja" or the epic construct in which Frederick's heroic life found its expression products of an enduring force, while in reality they had been built up in tiny daily portions from hundreds of inspirations, and when they only reached a certain degree of excellence because their master had endured the imposition of a certain work for years with the same tenacity and willpower that had helped conquer his home province and had only invested his most powerful and noble hours into their creation.

For an important intellectual product to be immediately weighty, a deep relationship or concordance has to exist between the life of its creator and the general lives of the people. These people are generally unaware why exactly they praise a certain work of art. Far from being truly knowledgeable, they perceive it to have a hundred different benefits to justify their adulation; but the real underlying reason for their behavior cannot be measured, is sympathy. Aschenbach had once mentioned it in a place where it might easily have been overlooked, that all truly great works exist despite of things, despite distress and pain, despite poverty, abandonment, weakness of the body, vice, passion, and a thousand obstacles. But it was more than just a remark, it was an experience, was almost the formula of his life and fame, the key to his work; and so it was not surprising if this was also the moral disposition, the demeanor of his most memorable characters.

About that novel, always recurring kind of heroic type so favored by this writer, a keen essayist had remarked once: that he was the conception of "an intellectual and ephebe-like masculinity that stands silent in proud shame, clenching its teeth while it is pierced by swords and spears." That was beautiful, intelligent, and correct, despite its somewhat exaggerated accentuation of passivity. Because grace under pressure is more than just suffering; it is an active achievement, a positive triumph and the figure of St Sebastian is its best symbol, if perhaps not in art generally, but certainly in the art of writing. Gazing at the written world, seeing the elegant self-restraint that guards an inner decomposition, a biological decay until the last moment from the prying eyes of the world; that bilious, sensually disadvantaged ugliness that is able to kindle its smoldering fire into a pure flame and to even usurp the throne in the kingdom of beauty; the pallid impotence, which retrieves from the glowing depths of the soul the power to prostrate an entire wanton people before the cross, before its own feet; the amiable attitude in the empty and severe employ of the form; the counterfeit and dangerous life; the quickly unnerving yearning and art of the born fraud: considering all these things and so many others more, one could doubt if there even was a sort of heroism not marked by meekness. And what kind of heroism would be more timely than this one? Gustav Aschenbach was the poet of all those who were laboring on the brink of exhaustion, the overburdened and worn out, who still tried to keep upright, those moralists of performance, who, being lanky and of limited means, through willpower and clever management can conjure the effect of greatness at least for a time. They are numerous, they are the heroes of our age. And they all recognized themselves in his work, they found themselves vindicated, elevated, celebrated in it, thanked him generously and spread his name.

He was young and had been rough with time, listening to its bad advice he had made mistakes, had compromised himself, had trespassed against good behavior and prudence, both in his words and works. But he had gained that dignity towards which every genius has an inner drive, one could even say that his whole development had been a conscious and defiant ascent towards dignity, an ascent that defied all those hindrances of doubt and irony.

Lively, yet non-binding concreteness of formation is the foundation of the delight of the bourgeois masses, but the absolute ardor of youth is only interested in the problematic: and Aschenbach was problematic, had been as absolute as any other youth. He had indulged in the mind, ruthlessly mined for knowledge, had milled his seeds, given away secrets, brought talent under suspicion, betrayed art — and while his creations were entertaining and reviving and elevating the pious epicures, he, the young artist, had kept the twenty- year-olds breathless with his cynicism about the questionable nature of art and artists.

But it seems as if nothing dulls the noble and able mind quicker than the biting and bitter taste of awareness; and it is certain that the melancholy sedulous thoroughness of the youth is nothing in comparison to the deep conviction of the man who has become a master, his decision to deny that knowledge, to decline it, to completely ignore it when he finds it in the least capable of paralyzing, discouraging, and degrading. How else could the famous story of the "Miserable" be interpreted than as an outburst of disgust against the indecent psychologizing of the time, made flesh and blood in the figure of that soft and ridiculous scoundrel, who tries to trick fate by sending his wife, perhaps out of profligacy, out of moral weakness into the arms of a beardless one and thinks he is entitled to commit indecencies? The power of the word, with which the cast away is cast away, pronounces the turning away from all moral uncertainty, from every sympathy with the abyss, the reneging of that phrase of compassion, that "to understand all is to forgive all", and what was beginning here was that "wonder of the reborn impartiality", which was briefly mentioned in one of the author's dialogues with not a little mystery. What strange coherence! Was it a consequence of that "rebirth", that newfound dignity and severity, that at the same time an almost extreme enhancement of his sense of beauty was observed, that kind of noble purity, simplicity, and well-proportionedness of form, which from then on gave his works such a deliberate air of mastery and classicism? But moral determination without knowledge, without that dissolving and hindering perception — does it not also entail a simplification, a moral black-and-white view of the world and the soul and therefore also a tendency towards what is evil and forbidden? And is not form itself two-faced? Is it not moral and amoral at the same time — moral as an expression of discipline, amoral and even antimoral if it encompasses a moral indifference and tries to rule over what is moral?

However it may be! Development is also fate; and why should not the one which is participated in by the public take a different course from that which unfolds without the glamor and the duties of fame? Only never-ending vagary finds it boring and is wont to ridicule it when a remarkable talent outgrows its libertine past, gets used to expressly perceive the dignity of the mind and takes on the solitary mores full of unadvised, hardly independent sorrows and struggles which ascend to power and honors among men. Besides, how much play, resentment, indulgence is in the remaking of talent by itself! An official and paedagogic element slowly surfaced in Gustav Aschenbach's performances, his style departed from the direct boldness, those subtle and new distinctions of his earlier years, it transformed itself into the exemplary and solid, the conventionally polished, the preserving, formal, even formulaic, and like the anecdote about the Sun King purports to know, so the aging one exiled every base and common word from his vocabulary: At that time it happened that the ministry of education included selected writings of his in their schoolbooks. It suited him very well, and he did not resent it all when a German prince, just recently crowned, knighted the creator of the "Frederick" on his fiftieth birthday

After several years of unrest and much trying out of different places he soon picked Munich as his permanent hometown and there he lived in those bourgeois honors that in rare cases are bestowed upon the intellect. His marriage to a girl, the offspring of a highly educated family, had been terminated by her death. A daughter, already married herself, had remained. He had never had a son.

Gustav von Aschenbach was not particularly tall, with dark hair, beardless. His head seemed curiously oversized in relation to his almost frail figure. His brushed-back hair, thinning at the cortex, very voluminous at the temples and quite gray, framed a high, furrowed and, so to say, scarred forehead. The frame of golden eyeglasses cut into the root of a somewhat plump yet nobly curved nose. His mouth was large, often limp, sometimes small and tense all of a sudden; his cheeks were narrow and furrowed, the well- formed chin sported a cleft. Important fates seemed to have trespassed over the often sideways-tilted crown, and yet it had been art which had shaped that kind of physiognomy which otherwise is the hallmark of a difficult and troubled life. Behind that brow, the glittering repartees in the conversation between the King and Voltaire about war had been born; these eyes, looking at the world wearily through the glasses, had seen the bloody inferno in the field hospitals of the Seven Years' War. Even on a personal level art is a form of heightened living. It gives greater pleasures, it consumes faster. It stamps the features of its servants with the signs of imaginary and spiritual adventures, and it produces, even in the most cloister-like atmosphere, a certain fastidiousness, an over-refinement, an exhaustion and curiosity of the nerves, in a way even a life of the most outrageous passions and delights could scarcely effect it.