Death in Venice

by Thomas Mann

But while the nation honored his status as a master, he himself had no joy of it, as if his work lacked those tokens of fiery, playful spontaneity which were a result of joy and in turn created the joy of his readers more than any depth of substance could—tokens that were thus an important asset.

Aschenbach had once stated outright, in an inconspicuous passage, that nearly every great thing that exists exists “in despite,” and was brought to completion despite distress and torment, poverty, abandonment, physical weakness, vice, passion and a thousand obstructions. But that was more than an observation, it was a record of experience; indeed, it was the formula for his life and fame, the key to his oeuvre; and so is it any wonder that it also informed the moral nature and the external behavior of his most characteristic protagonists?

That was elegant, witty and correct, despite its apparently too passive formulation: because composure beneath blows of fate, graciousness in the midst of torment, does not signify mere endurance; it is an active achievement, a positive triumph, and the figure of Saint Sebastian is the most beautiful symbol, if not in all of art, then at least in the type of art we are discussing. When you looked into this fictional world of Aschenbach’s, you saw the elegant self-control that conceals the sapping of strength and biological decay from the eyes of the world up to the last minute; you saw yellowed ugliness, handicapped in its appeal to the senses, but nevertheless able to kindle its smoldering lust into pure flame and even to rise to dominance in the realm of beauty; you saw the pallid weakness that from the glowing depths of the spirit derives the strength to humble an entire haughty nation at the foot of the Cross, at its feet; you saw charming composure in the empty and severe service of form; you saw the false, dangerous life, the rapidly enervating yearning and art of the born deceiver.

Aschenbach had been as problematic and absolutistic as any youngster. He had been an addict of the intellect, had overexploited knowledge, had ground up seed-corn for bread, had divulged secrets, had cast suspicion on talent and had betrayed art—yes, at the same time that his word-pictures were entertaining, uplifting and enlivening his more naive readers, this youthful artist had kept the twenty-year-olds agog with his cynical remarks on the questionable nature of art and even the role of the artist.

And does not form possess a double face? Is it not moral and amoral at the same time—moral inasmuch as it is the result and expression of discipline, but amoral and even immoral to the extent that by nature it contains within itself an indifference to morality and indeed essentially strives to make morality bow before its proud and sovereign scepter?

Yes, even on a personal basis art is an enhancement of life. It makes you more deeply happy, it wears you out faster. It engraves on the face of its servant the traces of imaginary, intellectual adventures, and with time, even when his external existence is one of cloisterlike calm, it makes him spoiled and fastidious, producing a weariness and nervous curiosity that could hardly be generated by a lifetime full of extravagant passions and pleasures.

The observations and encounters of a solitary, taciturn man are vaguer and at the same time more intense than those of a sociable man; his thoughts are deeper, odder and never without a touch of sadness. Images and perceptions that could be dismissed with a glance, a laugh, an exchange of opinions, occupy him unduly, become more intense in the silence, become significant, become an experience, an adventure, an emotion. Solitude produces originality, bold and astonishing beauty, poetry. But solitude also produces perverseness, the disproportionate, the absurd and the forbidden.—Thus

Inborn in nearly every artist’s nature is a voluptuous, treacherous tendency to accept injustice if it creates beauty and to grant sympathy and homage to aristocratic preferences.

And with his hands folded on his lap, he let his eyes stray at random over the distant reaches of the sea; he let his gaze drift away, grow blurred, glaze over in the monotonous haze of that wilderness of space. He loved the sea for deep-seated reasons: because of the hard-working artist’s yearning for repose, his desire to take shelter in the bosom of undifferentiated immensity from the demanding complexity of the world’s phenomena; because of his own proclivity—forbidden, directly counter to his life’s work, and seductive for that very reason—for the unorganized, immoderate, eternal: for nothingness. To take rest in perfection is the desire of those who strive for excellence; and is not nothingness one form of perfection? But as he was now daydreaming so deeply, the horizontal line of the shore was suddenly intersected by a human

figure, and, when he summoned his gaze back from unbounded space and focused his eyes again, it was the beautiful boy who, coming from the left, was walking by in front of him on the sand. Barefoot, ready for wading, his slender legs bare to above the knees, he was walking slowly but with a step as light and proud as if he were thoroughly accustomed to go about without footgear, and he looked around toward the cabanas in the right-angled row. But scarcely had he noticed the Russian family, which was living its own life there in grateful harmony, when a storm-cloud of angry contempt covered his face. His forehead darkened, his mouth was raised up, an embittered twist of his lips to one side creased his cheek, and his eyebrows were so heavily wrinkled that his eyes seemed sunken beneath their pressure and, looking out from under, maliciously and blackly, spoke the language of hatred. He looked at the ground, looked behind him once more menacingly, then jerked his shoulder in a violent expression of disparagement and aversion and left his enemies behind him.

kind of delicacy or alarm, something like deference and shame, caused Aschenbach to turn aside as if he had seen nothing; for, as a serious chance observer of this passion, he was loath to make use of what he had seen, not even in his own thoughts. But he was exhilarated and shaken at...

directed against that totally good-natured segment of life, what had been as inexpressive as a god was placed within a human relationship; a precious artefact of nature, which had served only as a feast for the eyes, now appeared worthy of a deeper rapport; and the figure of the adolescent, already significant for its beauty, was now s...

Icon and mirror! His eyes embraced the noble figure standing there by the edge of the blue, and in a rising wave of rapture he felt that as he looked he understood beauty itself, form as divine thought, the one, the pure perfection, which dwells in the mind, and of which a human image and metaphor, slender and lovely, was offered here for worship. This was Aschenbach’s delirium, and the aging artist welcomed it unhesitatingly—yes, greedily. His mind was in labor pains; his cultural baggage was all helter-skelter; his memory cast up ancient thoughts that had been taught to him as a youth but had never yet been brought to life by his own ardor.

And then that crafty wooer made his subtlest pronouncement: that the lover is more divine than the beloved, because the god dwells in the former but not in the latter—perhaps the most delicate and ironical

thought that has ever occurred to man, the original source of all the roguishness and most secret lust of desire.

Never had he felt more sweetly the pleasure of words, never had he been so conscious that Eros dwells in the word, as during the dangerously delicious hours in which, seated at his rough table beneath the canvas, in view of his idol and with the music of his voice in his ears, he modeled his little essay on Tadzio’s beauty—that page and a half of choice prose whose purity, nobility and pulsating emotional tension were before long to excite the admiration of many. It is certainly a good thing that the world can see only finished works of art without knowing their origins, the conditions for their existence; for knowledge of the sources from which the artist derived his inspirations would often confuse and frighten away his public, thus vitiating the effects of his outstanding achievement. Strange hours! Strangely enervating labor! Oddly productive intercourse between the mind and a body! When Aschenbach put his work safely away and left the beach, he felt exhausted, indeed shattered; his conscience seemed to be accusing him as if he had committed some excess.

He had not expected this precious appearance, it came unhoped-for; he had not had time to settle his features into an expression of dignified calm. Joy, surprise and admiration were allowed to be freely depicted there when his eyes met those of the boy whom he had missed—and at that second Tadzio smiled: smiled at him in a communicative, familiar, charming and unconcealed way, with lips that only slowly opened into a smile. It was the smile of Narcissus bending over his reflection in the water, that profound, enchanted, long smile with which he holds out his arms to the mirror image of his own beauty—a very slightly twisted smile, twisted by the hopelessness of his endeavor to kiss the lovely lips of his reflection, coquettish, curious and quietly tormented, deluded and deluding.

The master’s pose of our style is a lie and folly, our fame and honorable status are a farce, the confidence the crowd has in us couldn’t be more laughable, and education of the people and of youth by means of art is a risky enterprise that ought to be prohibited.