asure
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 crass 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 Kroeger, 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 banal, 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 associated 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
unobtrusive 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 tha