Tonio Kroger

The music began; the couples bowed and advanced and interchanged. The assistant postmaster directed the dance; great heavens, he was actually directing it in French, and pronouncing the nasal vowels with incomparable distinction! Ingeborg Holm was dancing just in front of Tonio Kröger, in the set nearest to the glass door. She moved to and fro in front of him, stepping and turning, forward and backward; often he caught a fragrance from her hair or from the delicate white material of her dress, and he closed his eyes, filled with an emotion so long familiar to him: during all these last days he had been faintly aware of its sharp enchanting flavor, and now it was welling up once more inside him in all its sweet urgency. What was it? Desire, tenderness? envy? self-contempt? . . . Moulinet des dames! Did you laugh, fair-haired Inge, did you laugh at me on that occasion, when I danced the moulinet and made such a miserable fool of myself ? And would you still laugh today, even now when I have become, in my own way, a famous man? Yes, you would—and you would be a thousand times right to do so, and even if I, single-handed, had composed the Nine Symphonies and written The World as Will and Idea and painted the Last Judgment—you would still be right to laugh, eternally right . . . He looked at her, and remembered a line of poetry, a line he had long forgotten and that was nevertheless so close to his mind and heart: “I long to sleep, to sleep, but you must dance.” He knew so well the melancholy northern mood it expressed, awkward and half-articulate and heartfelt. To sleep . . . To long to be able to live simply for one’s feelings alone, to rest idly in sweet self-sufficient emotion, uncompelled to translate it into activity, unconstrained to dance—and to have to dance nevertheless, to have to be alert and nimble and perform the difficult, difficult and perilous sword-dance of art, and never to be able quite to forget the humiliating paradox of having to dance when one’s heart is heavy with love . . .