Lively, intellectually undemanding formulations are the delight of the bourgeois masses, while passionately unbending youth is excited only by the problematic, and Aschenbach was as problematic and unbending as any youth. He had overindulged the intellect, overcultivated erudition and ground up the seed corn, revealed secrets, defamed talent, betrayed art; yes, even as his works entertained, elevated, and animated the gullible reader, he, the youthful artist, held the twenty-year-olds in thrall to his cynical remarks about the questionable nature of art and artistic genius.
