SOURCE: "Tonio Krdger: An Interpretation," in Thomas Mann: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Henry Hatfield, Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1964, pp. 22-34.

i. Themes

Tonio Kruger occupies a central position in Thomas Mann's spiritual and artistic development. But a work of art must contain its own justification, and to appreciate the story there is no need to know anything of the author's physical or literary antecedents, nor to have read anything else he has written. Taken in and for itself, Tonio Kruger is many things—above all a tender study of youth, of its yearnings and sorrows and its soaring aspirations, of the incredible bitterness of its disillusion. Herein lies, perhaps, its widest appeal. But it is also the story of the growth of a man and artist into self-knowledge, while yet another major theme is an account of the process of artistic creation. Much of this process, its later stage of shaping and craftsmanship, lies outside our actual experience. Even these the poet may enable us to experience imaginatively, so that under his spell we embrace even the alien and unknown. But in one vital aspect of artistic creation, its early phase of "seeing" as distinct from "shaping," we share directly.

This, the aesthetic experience, is a special kind of awareness of the universe. It comes in those moments when we experience things and people, not in their bearing on our own needs and affairs, but for their own sake. They are then no longer simply particular people, things, or events.

We see through their accidental bounds and discover immense vistas beyond. Such moments of profound recognition are often the moments of "idle tears" which well up "from the depths of some divine despair"; idle in the absence of personal-practical cause or end, tears not for sorrows but for Sorrow. "What business of yours is the king who weeps because he is lonely?" Tonio asks with tender irony. And Hans could but have answered "What indeed?" Yet this power to weep with the king implies knowledge of a kind that Hans will never have, "star pupil" though he be. For it is not the result of gifts or ability, but of an inner relation to events. Tonio converts [what T. S. Eliot, in The Family Reunion, called] the "continual impact of external event" into real experience, endows fortuitous happenings with pregnant meaning and reads the pattern out of life. For him the walnut tree and the fountain, his fiddle and the sea, are more than themselves. Into them he sees "contracted" the "immensities" of beauty and art. Above all he possesses a Hamlet-like clairvoyance about his own reactions to people. He despises his teachers for their rejection of his verse-making. Yet he cannot help seeing their point of view too, so that, "on the other hand," he himself feels this verse-making to be extravagant, and "to a certain extent" agrees with them. These qualifying phrases haunt him painfully early. He is poignantly aware of this complexity in his relations to his parents. The contrast between them is more than just a contrast between two individuals. It is evocative of deeper issues, a symbol of the dualism in his own nature. His relation to Hans is equally complex. Tonio knows well enough that it is a relation which can never bring fulfilment, a love in which all the longing and burning, all attempts at closeness and all torture at their frustration, will be on one side. But he knows far more than this. And it is just in this more that the quality of awareness emerges most clearly. For even at fourteen he senses the universality held within this personal experience. Anyone so aware of life as he, cannot help being open and vulnerable to literature too, where the art of the poet underlines the universal within the particular. But this again cuts him off from Hans, for whom bangs and explosions are associated with fireworks, but scarcely with thrills over Don Carlos!

In this story Thomas Mann dwells mainly on the pain which awareness brings, on the separating effect of this kind of knowledge. Its compensations are ignored. Yet they are very real, as Tonio must ultimately have known. The joy it brings outweighs the pain. And even though awareness may make the pangs of suffering sharper, it yet removes from it the destructive quality of blind sorrow. To be so involved that we can see nothing beyond ourselves, to be so completely sufferer that light is shut out, and we grope along in the darkness of almost animal pain, is a deadening experience. "Dumpfheit," mere hollow existence, Goethe called such blind living, and preferred "a life eternally resonant," whether it brought him joy or sorrow.

This awareness, the power of being absorbed in something beyond oneself, of responding to the essential quality of a thing or event, the artist shares with others. But in him the mood is more intense and more permanent. The differentiation within the self is such that he more continuously per-ceives meanings which are hidden when we are absorbed in our own affairs. Of him it is especially true that "there is one man in us who acts and one who watches." Thomas Mann holds fast for us the very moment when this watching trembles on the brink of becoming literature, the transition from awareness to the communication of it through the medium of words. We can distinguish four phases in Tonio's love for Hans; not in time, for they may have happened in one single illumination, but in quality and depth of experience. First he loved Hans and suffered much on his account. That is a purely personal experience expressed in particular terms. Then he was so organized that he received such experiences consciously and recognized the hard fact that he who loves more must suffer more. That is a general human experience expressed in universal terms. But now—and this is the transition from "watching" to "shaping"—"he wrote them down inwardly," that is, the experience became formed, a kind of blueprint of a poem. Finally we get the hallmark of the artist, the pleasure in the experience, with all its bitter knowledge, for its own sake, without any thought of its practical value for his living: "to a certain extent he took pleasure in these experiences, without indeed adjusting his personal life to them nor gaining practical advantage from them."

Much of Tonio's delight in his beloved "fountain, walnut tree, his violin and, far away, the sea, the Baltic," is due to the music of their names, "names which can be included in verses, with good effect." It is the delight the poet takes in calling "the bright, unshadowed things he sees by name." When Lisaveta speaks of the "redeeming power of the word," she surely means that through his medium the artist's insight becomes manifestly fruitful. But again Tonio chooses to ignore the rewards and to dwell rather on the toll which the artist must pay for having surrendered to the power of his medium, a toll paid in sterility and isolation. Even as early as his love for Inge, Tonio realized that he must be in some sense remote from an experience in order to be able to "form" it into literature, remote, not in space or time, but in attitude. Later his joy in the world and the need for "distance" took such possession of him that he became merely an onlooker of himself and others. The roots of such an artist's loneliness lie deeper than is normally supposed. The restlessness which chafes at domesticity, the need to conserve his energy, these are only the more superficial aspects of the problem. His inner loneliness springs rather from his deep sense of failure as a human being. At some point in an experience words become more exciting to him than the experience itself. Even in an intimate relationship he fears he may be sidetracked by his artist's eye, his urge to form may suddenly "see" it, crying out to be shaped by his hand into a work of art. Tonio gives utterance to this sense of failure: "To see clearly, even through a cloud of tears and emotion, to recognize, notice, observe … even in moments when hands clasp each other, lips meet, when man's eyes are blinded by feeling."

Tonio has nothing but scorn for the dilettanti, those sparetime artists, who make the mistake of thinking they can pluck "one leaf, one single little leaf" from the laurel tree of art without paying for it with life itself. "The sterile branch" from Goethe's Tasso might serve as a motto to this whole conversation with Lisaveta. So humanly impotent does the artist seem to Tonio that he even questions his virility, and again a remark of Goethe's: "Every poem is, as it were, a kiss, which one bestows on the world; but children aren't born from mere kissing," might well complete the sentence he leaves unfinished: "We sing so beautifully that it's really moving. However.…" It is the serene finality of art, its contrast with the deadly earnestness of all actuality, which tortures Tonio, as it tortured Nietzsche when he spoke of the flame of genius, "from whose bright circle everything flees, because, lit by the flame, it seems so like a Dance of Death, so foolish, thin as a lath and vain."

Just because Tonio feels equally strongly the pull toward life, he carries within him the possibility of harmony. But Hans is represented as completely lacking in imagination, and we cannot help wondering whether this must always and inevitably be so. Will Tonio's language never be, in part at least, his language? Will he forever be saying resignedly to the Hansens of this world: "Do not trouble to read Don Carlos"? We know that it need not be so, that, though it seems likely that this Hans will remain all his life what he is, there is also Hans Castorp, who begins as one of the "innocent, unseeing ones," but ends by discovering that the germs of imagination, which are in all of us, must not be surrendered, must be tended and harnessed in the service of life. When Tonio stands lost in window-longing, unable to join in the dance, he needs some friendly hand to help him out of his lonely introspection. But even more do Hans and Inge need a push in the opposite direction, need jolting out of the confident assumption that they are the hub of the universe. For only a balance between these two ways of experiencing can bring maturity: doing and seeing, being one of the crowd and being an onlooker. The important thing is that life should not only be lived in and for itself, but that it should also be known.

Tonio does go a considerable way toward maturity. By bringing his problem into the light, he rids himself of much of the bitterness which had been accumulating while he pursued a way of life so alien to one side of his nature. This clearing away of the old is essential if new values are to be born: "Die and be born again!" The irony of his final remark: "That settles me!" symbolizes the destruction of a former self. Soon after this self-confession, he feels the need to go back to his beginnings. As in a dream, he revisits his childhood, passes in review figures which have become symbols, and re-estimates their value for him. Despite his apparent emancipation, the influence of his father had been at work underneath, as his dreams betray clearly enough, secretly sapping his energy and undermining his confidence in himself and his calling. When now, in his dream return, he sees the old house, symbol of the burgher's way of life, filled with books, children begotten of the spirit, what a revelation it must seem of the way he ought to go! What an indication that the "toughly persistent diligence" of the burgher can play its part just as effectively in his own realm of the spirit. The tenderness with which the whole incident is suffused is a sign that the bitterness has been eased and the tensions relaxed.

An artist cannot fence off his living from his creating. They must run fluid one into the other. But he has also to learn not to let his entity as an artist be disturbed by the life he lets in. And he can only achieve this security if he accepts his art, if he believes in his mission of making life expressive for the inarticulate. Then he need not fear lest his art be shaken by rich, vital experience, nor lest his human relationships suffer because of the artist in him. Tonio comes to maturity when he accepts himself as an artist, an artist "from the very beginning, born and fated to be one," and repudiates that aestheticism which, through fear and insecurity, takes flight from the spring into the rarefied atmosphere of the coffeehouse! It remains eternally true that "What is to live in song immortal, Must be destroyed in mortal life"; but equally true that "one must first be something, if one is to create something." "To have died" is only one stage in the process of artistic creation; and for the artist to cut himself off from life altogether means going out into the waste land of pure form and art for art's sake.

As a man, too, he matures. The journey to self-knowledge has brought him the courage to face the isolation of personality, and he is now content to leave those he loves in their "otherness" without wishing to possess them. Out of the growing acceptance of himself, the longing for what he is not is eased, and he can watch with tender understanding their small intensities which are none of his intensity, and love them with the love which is extolled in the thirteenth chapter of St. Paul's First Epistle to the Corinthians.

ii. Artistry

The art of story-telling, that is quite simply the art of compelling people to listen, even if one disregards the content.

No analysis of the artistry by which Thomas Mann compels us to listen to his story can ever take the place of direct appreciation. Criticism is never a substitute for the aesthetic experience. After—and only after—we have been exposed to the direct impact of a work, analysis can perhaps help us to further deepened and enriched experience of it. But there remains always the task of synthesizing what has been analyzed, and this cannot be done by a simple process of adding parts. The whole is always greater than the sum of the parts, and different. Synthesis can only be achieved by surrendering again to the power of the story itself.

The architectonic outlines of this novella grow naturally out of the requirements of the story. Its mixture of epic and dramatic, the absence of connecting links, justify Thomas Mann's own description of it as a prose ballad. Two brief episodes give the essence of the youthful Tonio. There follows a short narrative passage leading to the central reflective part, where all that was implicit is made explicit. It is a commentary on those dramatic scenes which were directly presented to our imagination, but there is nothing artificial about it. It is natural that Tonio, caught at a turning point in his life, should render account to himself of all he has been and is becoming. This is the critical turning point of the novella, and it occurs simultaneously on three planes. In the outer world of space and time the turning point is marked by his decision to leave Munich. In the inner world of the spirit it is a moment of rebirth, marked by his wholehearted affirmation of life. And in the timeless world of form the ballad-style here gives way to long monologues of introspective reflection. The final part is again dramatic, but in a different way. In revisiting his past Tonio trails behind him the cloak of all that has happened in between. There is consequently a large measure of introspection to this second drama. Not only are the episodes of the first part fused into one experience, but the conversation with Lisaveta vibrates beneath. With the final admission that his deepest love is still for the "blond, the blue-eyed," the novella returns to its beginnings.

The perfect symmetry is achieved by the skilful weaving of the strands, backwards and forwards, so that the past fulfils the future as surely as the future fulfils the past. The Hans and Inge motifs, announced separately at first, are loosely intertwined as Tonio paces the streets of Luibeck. But in Denmark these strands are pulled taut and woven together with symbolic value. How subtle are the variations in this disturbingly familiar quadrille scene! There is no M. Knaak, but the directions are in French all the same and with "nasals"! The second confession to Lisaveta, this time in letter form, rounds off the whole. Nothing is lacking to complete the symmetry. Even the short epic transition leading to the scene with Lisaveta finds its echo. For, as Tonio lies in bed after his encounter with Hans and Inge in Denmark, his thoughts run back to those years of "rigidity, desolation, ice.…"

The two first episodes are brilliant illustrations of the choice of a "pregnant moment." Each, the walk and the dancing lesson, occupies at most an hour. How in so short a time does the author manage to convey a relationship so that we breathe its very essence? He does it by skilful choice of time and place, catching the relationship at flood tide and in a situation calculated to reveal all the pull and thrust of tensions. The books we like, the people we admire, the activities we pursue, are eminently revealing, and Thomas Mann makes full use of this fact. Hans loves horse-riding, and the contrast between his "books about horses, with snapshots" and Tonio's Don Carlos brings out strikingly the incompatibility of their natures. When Mann introduces Erwin Immerthal we experience directly the ease of Hansen's manner with his own kind, and his awkwardness with Tonio is thereby thrown into greater relief. In the Inge episode the contrasts are between the sheer physical delight in the dance and Tonio's escape into the imaginative world of Immensee, between Inge's admiration of M. Knaak and her scorn of Tonio's clumsiness. Despite the unmistakably different atmosphere of these two stages of adolescence, there is a marked parallelism which gives a satisfying sense of form.

Just as the symmetry grows naturally out of the requirements of the story, so too the ironic style is the ideal form for a hero who stands between two worlds and for a situation in which the artist admires and needs the burgher, and the burgher replies by arresting him! As long as spirit (Geist) and life remain unreconciled in Thomas Mann's work, they are treated with irony, "something in between, a neither-nor and both-and." Hence those qualifying phrases so akin to our English understatement and derived no doubt from that Low German parentage which we and he have in common. The style of a writer, he declares, is ultimately, if one listens closely enough, a sublimation of the dialect of his forefathers: "and I make no secret of the fact that … in its absence of passion and grandiloquence, in its proneness to mockery and pedantic thoroughness, my style is a typical Lubeck mode of speech." His dry humor often results from an aside which jerks the reader out of his absorption in the story, inviting him to study the character with detachment: "for he played the violin"; "for he often said.…" Understatement has the special virtue of arousing interest while leaving scope for the imagination to complete the picture. How effectively it is used here to convey that moment when some ordinary and familiar object or person is suddenly illumined by a new and unearthly light: "He had seen her a thousand times; on one evening however he saw her in a certain light, saw how she … laughing, threw her head to one side in a certain proud manner, in a certain manner raised her hand … to the back of her head … heard how she accented a word… in a certain way.… That evening, he took her image away with him." The repetition of "certain" implies far more than is actually said and sends our imagination in pursuit of what Tonio saw.

Ideas are but the raw material of art, and only by taking on body can mind become spirit. Thomas Mann, being first and foremost an artist, expresses his thoughts naturally in images. His are not the primordial, universal images we find in poetry. They are suggested by figures and events of his immediate surroundings: father and mother, the friends and loves of his youth, a criminal banker he has known, a lieutenant he has met, a prince in civilian clothes, a young businessman, an actor without a part. Everything is presented in sensuous form rather than in concepts: not sterility, but the laurel tree; not separateness, but the mark on his brow; not responsibility, but immaculate sober dress; not Bohemianism, but a ragged velvet jacket and a red silk waistcoat; not art versus life, but "fixative and the odor of spring," "the perilous knife-dance of art and life's sweet, banal waltz time." The names are symbolic, too. Why is Lisaveta a Russian except that she acts as confessor to Tonio's introspection in the manner of Turgenev? Or M. Knaak so typically Low German except to emphasize the spuriousness of his French pretensions? Why Magdalena, except that in some obscure way intimate associations had formed in the author's mind between this name, moralor physical-falling, and those early Christians "with clumsy bodies and fine souls?" Or take the ring of Tonio's own name, upper-middle-class like the cuisine of his Lubeck home, and derived from Krog, which occurs so frequently in Low German place names, signifying an inn! How it contrasts with the exotic Tonio, clearly his mother's choice, so that the very title announces the theme of the story!

An image becomes a symbol when it is remembered for the sake of some special significance it had for us. It is then stripped of irrelevant and extraneous detail, and details from other images of similar significance are often superimposed on the first and become part of the symbol. The episode of the lieutenant was clearly an actual incident in Tonio's experience. But we know at once that it has more than anecdotal significance for him, because it is related to the other anecdotes he tells solely by the accident of its connection with his own problem. This is the only thread on which all these stories are strung. Sometimes we can trace the development of an episode into a symbol. At first the girl "who often fell down while dancing," is a real person, and we are told details about her; her surname, her father's profession, that she asked Tonio to dance and to show her his poems, even that she asked him to do so twice, a detail quite irrelevant for the meaning of the symbol. Of all this he remembers only the connection between physical clumsiness and love of poetry, and in the conversation with Lisaveta makes the generalisation: "people with clumsy bodies and subtle souls, people who are always falling down, so to speak." The actual experience has become symbol. Later this symbol is transmuted into art. Magdalena is brought to life again, but no longer as an individual person. There adhere to her traits derived from his other experiences of people with spirit. She has become the symbolic peg on which to hang such associations.

Nowhere is the poet's power "to ring up the curtain for us" more evident than when, in Tonio's dream return to his home, he conveys the bittersweet melancholy of the days that are no more. The problem here is to raise an idea from the level of a mere concept to that of an emotional experience. The idea to be conveyed is a familiar one. When we relive something in the memory, everything happens much more quickly. The whole experience is telescoped. We do not have to take Tonio's word for it that this is what happens now. We go through the experience itself. Tonio lives his early life again, but we relive the first part of the novella. We do this because memory permeates the language and sets it vibrant, because the words are similar enough to awaken in us the same reminiscent melancholy which stirs in him. Yet there is that slight difference which is always there when we revisit a familiar scene or dream about it. We, too, feel that quality of pastness which is inseparable from memory. Hans and Tonio watched the train go by and, with the trustful confidence of children, waved to the man perched up on the last coach. The grown man, less spontaneous and more circumspect, merely gazes after him. Without any comment, merely by means of this slight alteration, we feel the whole weight of the intervening years. Similar variation is used with twofold effect at the gate of Hansen's old house. No mention of sedateness or of the time that has passed, but the same weight of years comes across merely because he swings the gate with his hand instead of riding on it. And here we see very clearly the telescoping effect of recollection. It all happens more quickly, detail and dialogue fall away. And whereas the first time we had the simple statement: "their hands, when they shook them, had been made quite wet and rusty by the garden gate," now Tonio's mood of pensive reflection is conveyed by the addition of: "Then for a while he examined his hand, which was cold and rusty." This is enough, without any direct reference to his emotional state.

The trance-like quality of this return is suggested by the magic use of words connected with sleep and dream, by the hypnotic effect of "Where was he going?" thrice repeated at regular intervals to mark the stages in this progress between sleeping and waking, by the tenderness with which he perceives that the narrow-gabled streets have become poignantly small! How directly we share in his experience when it says: "He would have liked to have kept going for a long time.… But everything was so cramped and close together. Soon one was at one's destination"! We, too, are brought up sharply, because we have arrived sooner than we expected.

The same dream light shines on his experiences in Denmark. Now that Hans and Inge have become symbols, they have the strangeness of all dream figures. In masterly fashion the uniqueness, the personal immediacy of this experience is preserved, while at the same time it is lifted beyond the particular to the typical. That they are not the old Hans and Inge, but figures on to which he has projected all his own imaginative yearning, is brought out by the significant little phrase: "who was perhaps his sister." This is indeed the Inge Holm he—and we—knew, and this the same little Hans Hansen grown up; the same and yet different, for she is every Inge, and he is every Hans.

In a purely artistic sense, Thomas Mann suggests, it was probably its musical qualities which most endeared his "lyrical novella" to its readers. "Here for the first time I grasped the idea of epic prose composition as a thought-texture woven of different themes, as a musically related complex—and later, in The Magic Mountain, I made use of it to an even greater extent. It has been said of the latter work that it is an example of the 'novel as architecture of ideas'; if that be true the tendency towards such a conception of art goes back to Tonio Kröger." When he speaks of a musical structure in his works he does not mean, like so many modern poets, that he is more concerned with the rhythmical arrangement of words than with their sense. The meaning of poetry is much more than that conveyed directly to the intelligence; far more is conveyed indirectly by the musical impression upon the sensibility. But, even so, this musical impression of poetry is never the same as that conveyed by music itself, for words have a meaning before they are rhythmically arranged in poetry. Thomas Mann is passionately concerned with the meaning of words, and the musical quality of his prose does not lie so much in their rhythmical arrangement, as in the repetition of certain phrases in different contexts, phrases which call up a whole world of associations as a snatch of song might do. This is the leitmotif technique which he adopted from Richard Wagner.

In Buddenbrooks the linguistic leitmotif was handled on an external and naturalistic basis. A descriptive phrase was attached to a character, a label, which usually called up some outward and accidental aspect of him rather than his essence. In Tonio Kröger the leitmotif is transferred from the outward to "the more lucent medium of the idea and the emotions, and thereby lifted from the mechanical into the musical sphere." From being a mere label each leitmotif now bears a strong emotional content arising from the central problem of the story, and they are woven into the texture with contrapuntal effect, each theme being pointed against another to express the fundamental opposition between art and life. Nowhere is this method used more skilfully or with greater effect than in the conversation with Lisaveta. Art and life run parallel throughout, both in theoretical formulation and in symbols ranging from one single word ("fixative" and "odor of spring") through phrases ("who are always falling down") to symbolic anecdotes (the lieutenant and the banker). First one voice announces the theme, then another takes it up. A contrasting theme is announced, and they are played off against each other as in a Bach fugue. Our delight is in tracing the emergence, the blending, the dividing and dying of the themes.

The reason for the effectiveness of the verbal leitmotif, when used in this way, is that we remember not only in images, but also emotionally. When a pregnant phrase is repeated, chords of remembrance are struck, which go on echoing in us long after the notes have died. Instead of recapturing only Tonio's remembrance of the past, we recall the whole emotional aura of our own original reaction to the phrase, a whole train of personal associations for which the author is not directly responsible.

Even when a leitmotif in Tonio is of a descriptive nature, it is nevertheless not used in the same way as in Buddenbrooks. Tonio's father is first described by a phrase which is little more than a label giving the essence of the burgher. But the context in which it occurs endows it immediately with emotional quality, for we connect Herr Krbger's concern at his son's bad report with his formal correctness. The next time this motif appears, the descriptive element recedes (his blue eyes are omitted); the appearance of the father is becoming symbolic of one side of the conflict in Tonio's breast. People see his way of life as an outward sign of the decay of the family. "The tall, thoughtful gentleman," his father, dies—that is, one side of himself dies, or goes into abeyance. The third time the symbolic aspect entirely predominates: "perhaps it was his inheritance from his father—the tall, thoughtful, cleanly dressed man, with a wildflower in his buttonhole, which made him suffer so much down there." Is the variant "cleanly" introduced as a kind of contrast to his own feeling of being sullied through his adventures of the flesh? It is as if the same theme were given out by another instrument. The fourth time it is modulated into a minor key. Time, by removing all nonessentials, has brought mellowness. Tonio's understanding of his father is growing, although he has long been dead. With deepened insight he sees through the impassive mask and knows that behind the immaculate gravity there lies something of wistful melancholy: "the tall, correct, rather melancholy and pensive gentleman with a wildflower in his button-hole." Each time the father motif is repeated, it is pointed against that of the mother, for together they symbolize the theoretical formulation of the problem: life—spirit, burgher—artist, North—South. Finally, in the letter to Lisaveta they are no longer used merely as leitmotifs, to evoke associations. Tonio now analyzes the significance of these symbols, thus fusing thought and emotion, idea and image.

But most of the leitmotifs in Tonio Kröger are not descriptive at all. It is fascinating to trace the development of a motif such as "to give form and shape to something, and in serene aloofness to fashion a complete whole out of it," to note how its emotional connotation varies each time it appears. It is first repeated twice within a few lines, so that we know at once that symbolic value is attached to it. Then it is blended with "effectivepointe," thereby establishing the symbolic significance of this alternative motif for shaping and forming. Henceforward they can be used, either separately or together, to call up the same associations. When they are played off against life within Tonio himself, against his love for Inge, for the spring or the walnut tree, these symbols of craftsmanship fall in the scale of values. But when they are contrasted with life outside him, with the slightly ridiculous figure of the blunt policeman, they rise. For then the shaping impulse is not pulling against his own urge to life, and he can note with satisfaction the "effective pointe" he has made. Finally, with increasing harmony, a balance of values is achieved. The sea inspires him to poetry, but he is too much under the stress of emotion to shape it. Yet he accepts this knowledge without impatience, content to wait for the "serenity" which will surely alternate with intensity of living. "It was not complete, not formed and shaped and not serenely fashioned to something whole. His heart was alive.…" These simple, independent statements are free of all the fret, the pull and thrust, of the two dependent clauses in which the motif first made its appearance.

It is no accident that three great influences in Thomas Mann's life were Schopenhauer, Wagner and Nietzsche, all passionate lovers of music. It was the symphonic music of Schopenhauer's thought which appealed to his very depths, and of Nietzsche he wrote: "his language is itself music." His apprehension of things was aural rather than visual, and it is little wonder that he paid such enthusiastic tribute to Schiller's Spontaneous and Sentimentive Poetry, in which the distinction between musical and plastic poetry was first made. This accounts for the criticism so often levelled against his work, that there was no landscape in it. In his defence he urges firstly that his is an urban scenery, to be more precise, the characteristic Gothic setting of his native Lubeck, with its tall towers, pointed gables, arcades and fountains, its grey skies and the damp wind whistling down the narrow streets which wend their crooked way from the harbor to the market square. And then, much more important, the sea beyond, Travemrinde, the town he knew from boyhood. "The sea is no landscape, it is the vivid experience of eternity, of nothingness and death, a metaphysical dream." It is the solace for all who have seen too deep into the complexity of things. Looking at it Tonio experiences "a deep forgetting, a free soaring above space and time," thereby anticipating Mann's absorption with the problem of time in The Magic Mountain. The sea, its rhythms, its musical transcendence, vibrates in the language of all his books, even when there is no talk of it. And no German since Heine, whom he idolized in his youth, has written of it so that we not only hear its rush and roar, but feel the spray and the salt tang on our lips and crush the shells beneath our feet.

Thomas Mann speaks of certain lyric poems by Theodor Storm which, "however old one becomes … cause this tightening of the throat, this being seized by an implacably sweet and sad sense of life; it was for its sake that one was so devoted, at sixteen or seventeen, to this cadence." One can say the same of his own Tonio Krger. If we are young we experience this tightening of the throat because Tonio is part of all of us; as we grow older, because he is what we were and because, like him, we too have to come back to our beginnings and recognize that it could not have been otherwise, that it all had to happen thus. Like him we hope to be able to accept this knowledge.

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning.