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But Tonio Kröger stood yet awhile before the chilled altar, full of wonder and disappointment to find that faithfulness was impossible on earth. Then he shrugged his shoulders and went his way.

III

He went the way he had to go, a little carelessly and unevenly, whistling to himself, looking into space with head on one side; and if he went astray, that was because there simply is no right path for some individuals. If you asked him what in all the world he intended to be, he would supply varying information, for he was wont to say (and had already written it down) that he had in him the possibilities of a thousand forms of existence, together with the secret consciousness that they really were one and all impossibilities.

Even before he departed from his cramped native city, the clamps and threads with which it held him had gently loosened their hold. The old family of the Krögers had little by little begun to crumble and disintegrate, and men had reason to reckon Tonio Kröger’s own existence and nature among the other features of that process. His father’s mother had died, the head of the family, and not long afterward his father, the tall, meditative, carefully dressed gentleman with the wild flower in his buttonhole, had followed her in death. The big Kröger house together with its honorable history was for sale, and the firm went out of business. Tonio’s mother, however, his beautiful, passionate mother, who played the piano and the mandolin so wonderfully, and to whom everything was quite immaterial, married anew after the lapse of a year, this time a musician, a virtuoso with an Italian name whom she followed to faraway lands. Tonio Kröger found this a trifle unprincipled; but was he called upon to prevent her? He who wrote verses and could not even answer the question what in all the world he intended to become …

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

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

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

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

So he lived in great cities and in the South, from whose sunshine he promised himself a more luxuriant maturing of his art; and perhaps it was the blood of his mother that drew him thither. But as his heart was dead and without love, he fell into adventures of the flesh, sank deeply into lust and the guilt of passion, and suffered unspeakably from it all. Perhaps it was the heritage of his father in him, of that tall, meditative, neatly dressed gentleman with the wild flower in his button-hole, that made him suffer so down yonder, and that occasionally set in motion within him a faint, yearning recollection of a pleasure of the spirit, which had once been his own, and which he could not find again in all his pleasures.