the artist, a criminal, a eunuch, a charlatan, a fake, doomed to an onanistic excitation ('only the excitations and cold-blooded ecstasies of the artist's corrupted nervous system are artistic'). The Russian woman, Tonio's partner in the conversation, does, it is true, put in amused objections from time to time, but these are thrust aside with renewed outbursts of fanatical assertion: Tonio is allowed to win the last trick, his initial assumptions are allowed to remain unquestioned. 'Everyone knows that artists are "sensitive" and easily wounded, just as everybody knows that ordinary people with a good conscience and a well-founded confidence in themselves are not.' The 'Burger' possesses this good conscience and well-founded self-assurance; that the artist does not is proof of his inferiority. Tonio's argument is as unreasonable as that.

There is a point at which the discussion goes deeper than these sweeping assertions, the point when Lisaveta advances a conception of literature as a 'guide to understanding, forgiveness and love' and of the writer as 'perfect man, a saint'. Tonio's reply, in which he sees such a conception as the basis of the Russian novel, is, however, as irrational and evasive as the rest of his comments. He sees the issue in a way which neither Dostoevsky nor Tolstoy could have recognized as their own. For him, the question is not whether human faults can be forgiven, or humanity loved despite awareness of its imperfection, but rather whether it is possible to feel a moral superiority in oneself: 'Not to let the sadness of the world unman you; to read, mark, learn, and take into account even the most torturing things and to be of perpetual good cheer, in the sublime consciousness of moral superiority over the horrible invention of existence—yes, thank you!' The concession in this 'yes, thank you!'(ja freilich!) indicates that this is how Tonio imagines the Russians to have felt: for him it is a matter of perceiving imperfection and yet continuing to pride himself on his distinctiveness, continuing to be in good spirits. The remainder of his reply then seeks to demonstrate that this, not love or forgiveness, is an impossibility. And, significantly enough, for such obliqueness and irrelevance in argument is typical of all Mann's work, Lisaveta fails to point out that her objection has been disregarded in a flood of words which, by the end of the paragraph, has become completely unintelligible.

The best understanding we can reach of Tonio's attitude, in which he does nevertheless achieve a sense of superiority, comes from a passage a little further on. Having asserted that renewed insights into human nature constantly destroy such peace of mind as he can attain, Tonio comes to his solution. It is, in short, that life continues despite all criticism that may be made of it: 'You see, the literary man does not understand that life may go on living, unashamed, even after it has been expressed and thereby done with. No matter how much it has been redeemed by becoming literature, it keeps right on sinning—for all action is sinning, viewed with the eyes of the Spirit'. That is to say, that although the literary writer may 'express' life and thereby have 'done with' it; although he may point out its faults and thereby (in a sense understandable only in a way peculiar to Mann's thought) 'redeem' it, life will go on 'sinning', for any action is certain to be sinful if regarded from that 'spiritual' position which the artist occupies. With this, Tonio expresses himself in a confusion difficult to unravel. The term 'Literat', or 'literary man', is obviously pejorative: writers in general, we are to understand, fail to realize how pointless their criticisms of life really are. 'Geist', on the other hand, is a term of approval: from the viewpoint of the 'Spirit', which presumably some writers adopt, the criticisms are valid. The validity, however, is limited to the sphere of'Geist', and has no real relevance to life. Thus the criticisms of the artist can be both praiseworthy and damnable (we recall the expression 'godlike-diabolical' used in relation to Goethe) and yet have no consequences for living. 'Life' goes on unashamedly just as did the elder Johann Buddenbrook, or Hugo Weinschenk before he went to prison. It 'sins boldly', to recall Luther's phrase, but not in his sense, that it does so through faith in its redemption, but rather because the sinning is of no importance. It is on these terms that Tonio now goes on to declare that he loves life, not as Nietzsche did, but for the sake of 'the normal, respectable and lovable', 'a little friendship, devotion, familiar human happiness'. The fact that 'the respectable', presumably, is also sinful from the standpoint of the Spirit, that he cannot use these terms at all from the position he has just adopted, does not occur to Tonio, nor does his exclusion of more passionate ways of living seem to him to require any justification. The 'disgust with knowledge', and the capacity of Life to go on sinning despite criticism have nothing to do with this conclusion, which merely reasserts a few values that were, earlier, implicitly supposed to be undermined by the artist's perceptiveness.

This discussion—or rather, assertion, for Tonio's partner does nothing of any consequence to hold him to the point—is the core of the story. The incidents before and after it are presented in such a way as to seem illustrations and confirmations of Tonio's conclusion. At times they please, and may invite us to side with him: a benevolent approval is easily given to the American boys, to Ingeborg Holm and Hans Hansen, even to the tipsy Hamburg businessman who contemplates the stars in sentimental mood after a lobster supper. If that were all the story amounted to, if it were simply a somewhat sentimental, slightly comic description of people in more or less happy circumstances, there would be nothing to complain about, or it would be overdoing things to complain. But the discussion and the conclusion make the story more ambitious. Tonio seems to claim that he has overcome his 'disgust with his perceptions', yet the fact is, we see nothing in the story that might cause him disgust, still less anything that might cause him a disgust so deep that he despairs of living. For all that we see of them, these people simply are 'ordinary, decent citizens', learning to dance, enjoying themselves at a week-end hop, going about their business in a 'normal' way. We know nothing of their motives, nothing even of their circumstances for the most part; we never see below the surface or have a glimpse of their minds.

The 'artist', on the other hand, is cavalierly dismissed. Tonio prefers the simple wonder of the Hamburg businessman to the writings of some unnamed philosopher who also contemplated the stars, but we are not told the reasons for this preference. He concedes, when the hotel authorities take him for a criminal, that they may be in the right to do so, although not on the grounds they allege, and here the justification seems to be simply that they are 'men of the social order', while he is not. Towards the end, seeing the young Danish woman who reminds him of his first love Ingeborg, he demeans himself to the point of declaring that, had he achieved the works of Beethoven, Schopenhauer and Michelangelo together, she would be entitled to laugh him out of court as she did in her childhood. This is mere self-abasement, the counterpart and justification of the self-assertion to come.

Yet it is on such a groundwork that Tonio reaches his final solution, communicated in his letter to Lisaveta:

Ich bewundere die Stolzen und Kalten, die auf den Pfaden der grossen, der dämonischen Schönheit abenteuern und den 'Menschen' verachten—aber ich beneide sie nicht. Denn wenn irgend etwas imstande ist, aus einen Literaten einen Dichter zu machen, so ist es diese meine Liebe zum Menschlichen, Lebendigen und Gewöhnlichen. Alle Wärme, alle Güte, aller Humor kommt aus ihr, und fast will mir scheinen, als sei sie jene Liebe selbst, von der geschrieben steht, dass einer mit Menschen-und Engelszungen reden könne und ohne sie doch nurein tönendes Erz und eine klingende Schelle sei.

I admire those proud, cold beings who adventure upon the paths of great and daemonic beauty and despise 'mankind'; but I do not envy them. For if anything is capable of making a poet of a literary man, it is my bourgeois love of the human, the living and usual. It is the source of all warmth, goodness, and humour; I even almost think it is itself that love of which it stands written that one may speak with the tongues of men and of angels and yet having it not is as sounding brass and tinkling cymbals.

This contradicts what Tonio had said earlier: 'the artist is done for, the moment he becomes human and begins to feel at all', and it is not at all clear how Tonio passes from the one view to the other. So much is clear, that this is his reply to Lisaveta's objection on behalf of the Russian novelists, that he means this to be his own achievement of saintly love, embarrassing though it is to hear him claim it on his own behalf. Yet he cannot really mean the Pauline 'agape' to which his words refer, for that was never understood to be restricted to a particular class, or to 'the ordinary' and 'the decent'. He has in mind something more akin to a Nietzschean definition of love, whereby love consists in not reflecting deeply about others, and the grounds for preferring this relationship with them are quite simply, as he himself confesses, that he has a 'fond weakness' for what is simple, loyal, pleasantly normal and decent. Indulging this weakness, if that is what it really amounts to (and what is weak about it, so far as it goes?), liking what is for the most part likable by definition, sounds a far cry from what Lisaveta described as 'the purifying and healing influence of letters'. So far as Tonio is concerned, the 'Biirger' remains stupid (one remembers how this word was used also of the first motif in Hanno's improvisation); he feels a certain contempt for him on this account, as well as a certain envy that the 'Burger' should be 'in agreement with everybody'. But this contempt and envy are the twin effects of his desire to feel morally superior to the world he lives in. He swings from one to the other, as he swings from self-abasement to self-assertion, precisely because he misinterprets Lisaveta's words.

Tonio Kröger confusedly illustrates a confused argument. Being a story, it still remains interpretable as the intentional portrayal of such a confusion, and yet this view is unsatisfying. The reader is put to such pains, sorting out the evasions and the illogicalities, the story has so much the air of presenting a satisfactory solution (and has in fact been taken in that sense), that he can hardly feel the author has given him enough help in penetrating his meaning, supposing the author to have maintained some deeply ironical reservations.… What does emerge much more clearly from Tonio Kröger is Mann's concern to present the case for conformity with the Wilhelmine society of his day. The artist is suspect here because he is opposed to that society in which Army lieutenants generally were regarded as lords of creation, and in which liberal-minded citizens were expected to bow down to the 'men of the social order'—and if this could be justified in the name of established religion, so much the better. More than this, Mann gives a handle to anyone who needs his support in defence of the racial superiority of this society. Tonio, while avowing his affection for tragic and comic figures, confesses, 'But my deepest and secretest love belongs to the blond and blue-eyed, the fair and living, the happy, lovable and commonplace'. This is essentially nothing else than Thomas Buddenbrook's preference for the healthy boy of his vision, whose unreflective happiness drove the unhappy to despair. The boy's cruelty has gone, or at least is not explicitly mentioned; the triumphant egoist has become more clearly identified with the 'Burger'; in other respects the ideal remains the same. We can, then, readily understand the comment of a contemporary newspaper critic who found in Mann 'perhaps the finest German prose-writer of today'. 'His manner', said this contributor to the Rheinisch-Westfdlische Zeitung, 'is absolutely Germanic, or alternatively Nordic. No sign of that Gallic quality, from which our literature suffers so much harm, is to be found in him.' This was what Mann's readers expected, and this was what he gave them. 'What a victory there is here [in the story Trisan] for vital living', the same critic continued; 'how matter-of-course it is, how cruelly it persuades us. Robust concreteness is Life, all else but poetic imaginings, dreams. And men of finer mettle are here but to suffer.' It was not exactly Mann's meaning; it left out of account his perfunctory pretence at a confrontation with moral issues, and his reaffirmation beyond 'disgust with knowledge'. But it was what the normal and decent, simple-hearted and loyal 'Burger', prospering without scruples in the Empire Bismarck had founded, most wanted to hear. To such people Tonio Kröger offered no difficulties at all. To anyone who read it more subtly it still said essentially the same thing, for as always in Mann the end returns to the beginning. Even the conforming phrase with which Tonio concludes in his maturity repeats exactly the phrase used of him in his schooldays. He has done no more than reiterate his condition with awareness.