Death in Venice — Chapter 2

Chapter 2 of 5 · Review of Death in Venice

The author of the lucid and powerful prose epic on the life of Frederick of Prussia; the patient artist who, in long labour, wove the populous tapestry of a novel called “Maja,” gathering so many varieties of human fate beneath the shadow of one idea; the creator of that vigorous tale entitled “A Wretch,” which showed a whole grateful generation of youth the possibility of moral resolution beyond the most profound knowledge; finally, the writer—and with this the works of his mature period are briefly designated—of the impassioned treatise on “Mind and Art,” whose ordering force and antithetical eloquence induced serious critics to place it directly beside Schiller's reasoning on naïve and sentimental poetry: this Gustav Aschenbach, then, had been born in L., a district town in the province of Silesia, the son of a senior judicial official. His ancestors had been officers, judges, administrative functionaries, men who, in service to the king and the state, had led their taut, respectably austere lives. A more inward spirituality had once been embodied among them in the person of a preacher; quicker, more sensual blood had entered the family in the preceding generation through the writer's mother, the daughter of a Bohemian musical director. From her came the signs of an alien race in his appearance. The marriage of sober conscientiousness in official duty with darker, more ardent impulses brought forth an artist, and this particular artist. Since his whole nature was directed toward fame, he showed himself, if not exactly precocious, at least early prepared and fitted for public life, thanks to the decisiveness and personal distinction of his tone. Scarcely more than a schoolboy, he already had a name. Ten years later he had learned to uphold his public standing from his writing desk, to administer his fame by being, within a single sentence of correspondence that had to be brief—for many claims press upon the successful and trusted man—both gracious and weighty. At forty, exhausted by the hardships and vicissitudes of the actual work, he had daily to master a post bearing stamps from all the countries of the earth.

As far removed from the banal as from the eccentric, his talent was made to win at once the faith of the broad public and the admiring, exacting interest of the discriminating. Thus committed from every side, while still a youth, to achievement—and indeed to extraordinary achievement—he had never known the idleness, never the negligence, of youth. When, at about thirty-five, he fell ill in Vienna, a subtle observer said of him in company: “You see, Aschenbach has always lived only like this”—and the speaker clenched the fingers of his left hand into a tight fist—“never like this”—and let the open hand hang comfortably from the arm of his chair. It was true; and the morally valiant element lay in the fact that his nature was anything but robust in constitution and was called to continual exertion without having been properly born for it.

Medical solicitude had excluded the boy from attending school and insisted upon instruction at home. Solitary, without comradeship, he had grown up, and yet had early been forced to recognize that he belonged to a stock in which it was not talent but the physical basis talent requires for its fulfilment that was rare—a stock accustomed to give its best early and in which ability seldom survived into years. But his favourite word was “Endure”—in his novel of Frederick he saw nothing other than the apotheosis of this word of command, which appeared to him the epitome of guiding, active virtue. He also longed ardently to grow old, for he had always held that only an artistry granted the power to be characteristically fruitful at every stage of human existence deserved to be called truly great, comprehensive, indeed truly honourable.

Since, then, he wished to bear on delicate shoulders the tasks with which his talent burdened him and to go far, he had the greatest need of discipline—and discipline, fortunately, was his inborn inheritance on his father's side. At forty and at fifty, just as already at an age when others squander, enthuse, and cheerfully postpone the execution of great plans, he began his day betimes by pouring cold water over chest and back; then, with a pair of tall wax candles in silver holders standing at the head of the manuscript, he offered up to art, in two or three fervently conscientious morning hours, the powers he had gathered in sleep. It was pardonable—indeed, it signified nothing less than the victory of his morality—if the uninformed took the world of Maja or the epic masses in which Frederick's heroic life unfolded for the product of compact strength and long breath, whereas they had rather been built up to grandeur in small daily portions from a hundred separate inspirations, and were so wholly excellent, excellent at every point, only because their creator, with a duration and tenacity of will akin to that which had conquered his native province, had for years withstood the tension of one and the same work and devoted exclusively his strongest and most worthy hours to its actual making.

For a significant product of the mind to exert an immediate effect both broad and deep, a profound kinship, indeed a correspondence, must exist between the personal fate of its maker and the general fate of the contemporary generation. People do not know why they confer fame upon a work of art. Far removed from connoisseurship, they believe they discover in it a hundred merits to justify so much interest; but the true ground of their approval is something imponderable: sympathy. In an inconspicuous passage Aschenbach had once directly declared that nearly everything great that stood in the world stood as an In-Spite-Of, had come to pass despite sorrow and torment, poverty, abandonment, bodily weakness, vice, passion, and a thousand hindrances. But this was more than an observation; it was an experience, indeed the formula of his life and fame, the key to his work; and what wonder, therefore, if it was also the moral character, the outward gesture, of his most distinctive figures?

Of the new heroic type, recurring in manifold individual manifestations, which this writer favoured, a discerning analyst had written early on that it was the conception “of an intellectual and youthful manhood” which “in proud shame clenches its teeth and stands calmly while swords and spears pass through its body.” This was beautiful, ingenious, and exact, despite its apparently over-passive formulation. For composure in the face of fate, grace in torment, signifies more than mere endurance; it is an active accomplishment, a positive triumph, and the figure of Sebastian is the most beautiful emblem, if not of art altogether, then certainly of the art under discussion. If one looked into this narrated world, one saw elegant self-command concealing until the last moment an inward hollowing-out, a biological decay, from the eyes of the world; yellow ugliness, sensually disadvantaged, able to kindle its smouldering lust into pure flame, indeed to rise to dominion in the realm of beauty; pale impotence drawing from the incandescent depths of the mind the power to cast a whole insolent people at the feet of the cross, at _her_ feet; gracious bearing in the empty and austere service of form; the false, dangerous life, the rapidly enervating longing and art of the born deceiver: if one considered all this fate, and how much more of the same kind, one might doubt whether any heroism existed other than the heroism of weakness. Yet what heroism, at any rate, could be more timely than this? Gustav Aschenbach was the poet of all those who work at the margin of exhaustion, of the overburdened, the already worn down who still hold themselves upright, of all these moralists of achievement who, slight in build and brittle in resources, wrest from themselves, through ecstasy of will and prudent management, at least for a time the effects of greatness. There are many of them; they are the heroes of the age. And all of them recognized themselves again in his work, found themselves affirmed, exalted, celebrated there; they were grateful to him, they proclaimed his name.

He had been young and raw along with his time and, ill-advised by it, had stumbled in public, made blunders, exposed himself, committed offences against tact and prudence in word and work. But he had won the dignity toward which, as he maintained, a natural urge and spur is innate in every great talent; indeed, one may say that his entire development had been a conscious and defiant ascent to dignity, leaving behind every inhibition of doubt and irony.

The lively, intellectually uncommitted palpability of artistic representation forms the delight of the bourgeois masses, but passionately absolute youth is enthralled only by the problematic: and Aschenbach had been problematic, had been absolute, as much as any youth. He had indulged the mind, had strip-mined knowledge, ground seed-corn, betrayed secrets, cast suspicion upon talent, betrayed art—indeed, while his imaginative creations entertained, uplifted, and animated those who enjoyed in faith, he, the youthful artist, had kept the twenty-year-olds breathless with his cynical utterances on the questionable nature of art, of artistry itself.

But it seems that against nothing does a noble and capable mind grow dull more quickly or more thoroughly than against the sharp and bitter stimulus of knowledge; and it is certain that the youth's most melancholically conscientious thoroughness signifies shallowness beside the profound resolve of the man become master: to deny knowledge, to reject it, to look beyond it with head held high whenever it is capable, in the slightest degree, of paralysing, discouraging, or degrading will, deed, feeling, and even passion. How, after all, could the famous tale of “The Wretch” be interpreted except as an eruption of disgust against the indecent psychologism of the age, embodied in the figure of that soft and foolish half-scoundrel who steals himself a destiny by driving his wife, from impotence, depravity, and ethical velleity, into the arms of a beardless youth, and believes that profundity entitles him to commit acts of baseness? The force of the word with which the reprehensible was here repudiated proclaimed the turn away from every moral ambiguity, from every sympathy with the abyss, the rejection of the laxity in the merciful maxim that to understand all is to forgive all; and what was preparing itself here, indeed already accomplishing itself, was that “miracle of unselfconsciousness reborn” expressly mentioned a little later in one of the author's dialogues, and not without mysterious emphasis. Strange connections! Was it an intellectual consequence of this “rebirth,” of this new dignity and severity, that at about the same time observers noted an almost excessive strengthening of his sense of beauty, that noble purity, simplicity, and symmetry of form which henceforth gave his productions so palpable, indeed deliberate, a stamp of mastery and classicism? But moral resolution beyond knowledge, beyond dissolving and inhibiting cognition—does it not mean, in turn, a simplification, a moral simple-mindedness imposed upon world and soul, and therefore also a strengthening toward evil, the forbidden, the morally impossible? And has form not a double face? Is it not moral and immoral at once—moral as the result and expression of discipline, but immoral and even counter-moral insofar as it contains by nature a moral indifference, indeed essentially strives to bend the moral beneath its proud and unrestricted sceptre?

Be that as it may! A development is a destiny; and how should one accompanied by the participation and mass confidence of a wide public not run a different course from one fulfilled without the splendour and obligations of fame? Only eternal gypsydom finds it tedious and is inclined to mock when a great talent outgrows the libertine puppet-stage, grows accustomed to making expressive acknowledgement of the mind's dignity, and adopts the courtly manners of a solitude that was full of unadvised, harshly independent sufferings and struggles and attained power and honours among humankind. How much play, defiance, and pleasure, moreover, there is in talent's shaping of itself! With time something officially didactic entered Gustav Aschenbach's published work; in later years his style renounced direct audacities, subtle and novel shadings, transformed itself into the exemplary-established, the polished-conventional, the conserving, formal, even formulaic; and as tradition tells of Louis XIV, so the ageing man banished every common word from his usage. It was at that time that the education authorities included selected pages of his in the prescribed school readers. This suited him inwardly, and he did not refuse when a German prince, newly come to the throne, conferred personal nobility upon the poet of “Frederick” on his fiftieth birthday.

After some years of unrest, some trial residences here and there, he early chose Munich as his permanent home and lived there in that condition of civic honour which, in exceptional cases, falls to the mind. The marriage he had entered while still young with a girl from a scholarly family was severed by death after a brief season of happiness. A daughter, already a wife, remained to him. He had never had a son.

Gustav von Aschenbach was somewhat below middle height, dark-haired, clean-shaven. His head appeared a little too large in proportion to the almost delicate figure. His hair, brushed back, thinning at the crown, very full and heavily greyed at the temples, framed a high forehead, rugged and seemingly scarred. The bridge of gold spectacles with rimless lenses cut into the root of his compact, nobly curved nose. The mouth was large, often slack, often suddenly narrow and tense; the region of the cheeks was lean and furrowed, the well-formed chin softly cleft. Momentous fates appeared to have passed over this head, most often tilted sideways as if in suffering, and yet it was art that had undertaken here the physiognomic elaboration otherwise wrought by a hard and eventful life. Behind this forehead had been born the flashing replies in the conversation between Voltaire and the king on war; these eyes, looking tiredly and deeply through the lenses, had seen the bloody inferno of the military hospitals in the Seven Years' War. Even in personal terms, art is indeed a life raised to a higher power. It bestows deeper happiness; it consumes more swiftly. It engraves in the face of its servant the traces of imaginary and spiritual adventures, and in the long run, even amid monastic stillness of outward existence, it produces a pampered sensitivity, over-refinement, weariness, and nervous curiosity such as a life full of the most extravagant passions and pleasures could scarcely bring forth.