Death In Venice Read Online Free PDF Page A

bend morality beneath its proud and absolute scepter? Be that as it may, development is destiny, and should it not take one course if lacking in the glamour and obligations of fame and another if attended by the interest and trust of a broad audience? Only incorrigible bohemians find it boring or laughable when a man of talent outgrows the libertine chrysalis stage and begins to perceive and express the dignity of the intellect, adopting the courtly ways of a solitude replete with bitter suffering and inner battles though eventually gaining a position of power and honor among men. And what sport, what bravado, what pleasure there is in fashioning one's own talent! As time progressed, Gustav Aschenbach's creations took on an official, didactic tone: in later years his style lost its brashness, its fresh, subtle nuances; it became fixed and exemplary, polished and conventional, conservative, formal, even formulaic, with the result that the aging man-like Louis XIV, if we are to believe tradition-banned all prosaic words from his vocabulary. It was then that school officials began including selected passages from his works in the textbooks they prescribed. He found it only fitting that a German prince who had just ascended the throne should confer nobility upon the author of Frederick on his fiftieth birthday, and he did not decline the honor. After several restless years of testing this place and that, he eventually chose Munich as his permanent residence and led a solid bourgeois existence there, enjoying the respect that is in certain cases vouchsafed the intellect. The marriage he had contracted in his youth with a girl from a scholarly family was cut short, following a brief period of bliss, by the girl's death. It left him with a daughter, who was now married. He had had no son. Gustav von Aschenbach was of somewhat less than medium height, dark, and clean-shaven. The head seemed a bit too large for the almost dainty physique. The hair, brushed back, was thin at the crown but very thick and gray at the temples and framed a high, rugged, scarredlooking forehead. The gold frame of the rimless spectacles cut into the root of a strong, nobly aquiline nose. The mouth was large-now slack, now suddenly narrow and tight-the cheeks sunken and furrowed, the wellshaped chin slightly cleft. Important destinies must have passed through that head, which was often tilted dolefully, yet it was art-not, as is commonly the case, a hard and turbulent life-that had formed the physiognomy. The dazzling give and take of the interchange between Voltaire and the king on the subject of war had been conceived behind that brow; those eyes, wearily peering out through their lenses, had seen the gory inferno of the sick bays in the Seven Years War. On a personal level, too, art is life intensified: it delights more deeply, consumes more rapidly; it engraves the traces of imaginary and intellectual adventure on the countenance of its servant and in the long run, for all the monastic calm of his external existence, leads to self-indulgence, overrefinement, lethargy, and a restless curiosity that a lifetime of wild passions and pleasures could scarcely engender.
    THREE
    Several matters of a mundane and literary nature kept him in Munich for approximately a fortnight after that walk, eager though he was to be on his way, but at last he gave orders for his country house to be made ready for occupancy within four weeks, and on a day between mid and late May he set off by night train for Trieste, where he tarried only twenty-four hours, boarding the ship for Pola the next morning. What he sought was something exotic and distinctive yet of easy access, and so he stopped at an island in the Adriatic, not far from the coast of Istria, one that had acquired a following in recent years and featured colorful raggle-taggle rustics speaking an outlandish tongue and beautifully jagged cliffs facing the open sea. But rain, a heavy atmosphere, the provincial closed