ssion, exquisite,
impoverished, exhausted by frigid and artificially selected
exaltations, astray, laid waste, tortured, diseased--and he sobbed with
repentance and homesickness.

About him it was quiet and dark. But from below the sweet, trivial
waltz time of life came up to him muffled and swaying.

IX

Tonio Kroeger sat in the North and wrote to Lisaveta Ivanovna, his
friend, as he had promised.

Dear Lisaveta, down yonder in Arcadia, whither I shall soon return, he
wrote. Here, then, is something like a letter, but it will probably
disappoint you, for I am thinking of keeping it somewhat general. Not
as if I had nothing to tell, or had not had this or that experience on
my journey. At home, in my native town, they were actually going to
arrest me ... but of that you shall hear by word of mouth. Now I
frequently have days on which I prefer making some good general
observations to telling stories.

I wonder if you still remember, Lisaveta, that you once called me a
commoner, a commoner astray. You called me so at a time when I was
confessing my love for that which I call Life, being led on to it by
other confessions which I had allowed to escape me; and I ask myself
whether you knew how closely you struck the truth in calling me so, how
nearly my commonership and my love for "life" are one and the same
thing. This journey has given me occasion to think about it ...

My father, you know, was of a Norse temperament: reflective, thorough,
Puritanically correct, and inclined to melancholy; my mother of
nondescript exotic blood, beautiful, sensual, naive, at once slovenly
and passionate, and of an impulsive and unprincipled mind. Quite
without doubt this was a mixture which involved extraordinary
possibilities, and extraordinary dangers. What came of it was this: a
commoner who lost his way into art, a Bohemian homesick for a model
nursery, an artist with a bad conscience. For it is of course my
bourgeois conscience which makes me see in all artistry, in all
unusualness and all genius something deeply ambiguous, deeply dubious,
deeply disreputable, and which fills me with this lovelorn weakness for
the simple, candid, and agreeably normal, for the decent and mediocre.

I stand between two worlds, am at home in neither, and in consequence
have rather a hard time of it. You artists call me a commoner, and
commoners feel tempted to arrest me ... I do not know which wounds me
more