Gustave Aschenbach was born at L----, a country town in the province of Silesia.  He was the son of an upper official in the judicature, and his forbears had all been officers, judges, departmental functionaries - men who lived their strict, decent, sparing lives in the service of king and state.  Only once before had a livelier mentality - in the quality of a clergyman - turned up among them; but swifter, more perceptive blood had in the generation before the poet's flowed into the stock from the mother's side, she being the daughter of a Bohemian musical conductor.  It was from her he had the foreign traits that betrayed themselves in his appearance.  The union of dry, conscientious officialdom and ardent, obscure impulse, produced an artist - and this particular artist: author of the lucid and vigorous prose epic on the life of Frederick the Great; careful, tireless weaver of the richly patterned tapestry entitled Maia, a novel that gathers up the threads of many human destinies in the warp of a single idea; creator of that powerful narrative The Abject, which taught a whole grateful generation that a man can still be capable of moral resolution even after he has plumbed the depths of knowledge; and lastly - to complete the tale of works of his mature period - the writer of that impassioned discourse on the theme of Mind and Art whose ordered force and antithetical eloquence led serious critics to rank it with Schiller's Simple and Sentimental Poetry.

      Aschenbach's whole soul, from the very beginning, was bent on fame - and thus, while not precisely precocious, yet thanks to the unmistakable trenchancy of his personal accent he was early ripe and ready for a career.  Almost before he was out of high school he had a name.  Ten years later he had learned to sit at his desk and sustain and live up to his growing reputation, to write gracious and pregnant phrases in letters that must needs be brief, for many claims press upon the solid and successful man.  At forty, worn down by the strains and stresses of his actual task, he had to deal with a daily post heavy with tributes from his own and foreign countries.

      Remote on the one hand from the banal, on the other from the eccentric, his genius was calculated to win at once the adhesion of the general public and the admiration, both sympathetic and stimulating, of the connoisseur.  From childhood up he was pushed on every side to achievement, and achievement of no ordinary kind; and so his young days never knew the sweet idleness and blithe laissez allez that belong to youth.  A nice observer once said of him in company - it was at the time when he fell ill in Vienna in his thirty-fifth year: 'You see, Aschenbach has always lived like this' - here the speaker closed the fingers of his left hand to a fist - 'never like this' - and he let his open hand hang relaxed from the back of his chair.  It was apt.  And this attitude was the more morally valiant in that Aschenbach was not by nature robust - he was only called to the constant tension of his career, not actually born to it.

      By medical advice he had been kept from school and educated at home.  He had grown up solitary, without comradeship; yet had early been driven to see that he belonged to those whose talent is not so much out of the common as is the physical basis on which talent relies for its fulfilment.  It is a seed that gives early of its fruit, whose powers seldom reach a ripe old age.  But his favourite motto was 'Hold fast'; indeed, in his novel on the life of Frederick the Great he envisaged nothing else than the apotheosis of the old hero's word of command, 'Durchhalten'', which seemed to him the epitome of fortitude under suffering.  Besides, he deeply desired to live to a good old age, for it was his conviction that only the artist to whom it has been granted to be fruitful on all stages of our human scene can be truly great, or universal, or worthy of honour.

      Bearing the burden of his genius, then, upon such slender shoulders and resolved to go so far, he had the more need of discipline - and discipline, fortunately, was his native inheritance from the father's side.  At forty, at fifty, he was still living as he had commenced to live in the years when others are prone to waste and revel, dream high thoughts and postpone fulfilment.  He began his day with a cold shower over chest and back; then, setting a pair of tall wax candles in silver holders at the head of his manuscript, he sacrificed to art, in two or three hours of almost religious fervour, the powers he had assembled in sleep.  Outsiders might be pardoned for believing that his Maia world and the epic amplitude revealed by the life of Frederick were a manifestation of great power working under high pressure, that they came forth, as it were, all in one breath.  It was the more triumph for his morale; for the truth was that they were heaped up to greatness in layer after layer, in long days of work, out of hundreds and hundreds of single inspirations; they owed their excellence, both of mass and detail, to one thing and one alone: that their creator could hold out for years under the strain of the same piece of work, with an endurance and a tenacity of purpose like that which had conquered his native province of Silesia, devoting to actual composition none but the best and freshest hours.

      For an intellectual product of any value to exert an immediate influence which shall also be deep and lasting, it must rest on an inner harmony, yes, an affinity, between the personal destiny of its author and that of his contemporaries in general.  Men do not know why they award fame to one work of art rather than another.  Without being in the faintest connoisseurs, they think to justify the warmth of their commendations by discovering in it a hundred virtues, whereas the real ground of their applause is inexplicable - it is sympathy.  Aschenbach had once given direct expression - though in an unobtrusive place - to the idea that almost everything conspicuously great is great in despite: has come into being in defiance of affliction and pain, poverty, destitution, bodily weakness, vice, passion, and a thousand other obstructions.  And that was more than observation - it was the fruit of experience, it was precisely the formula of his life and fame, it was the key to his work.  What wonder, then, if it was also the fixed character, the outward gesture, of his most individual figures?

      The new type of hero favoured by Aschenbach, and recurring many times in his works, had early been analysed by a shrewd critic: 'The conception of an intellectual and virginal manliness, which clenches its teeth and stands in modest defiance of the swords and spears that pierce its side.'  That was beautiful, it was spirituel, it was exact, despite the suggestion of too great passivity it held.  Forbearance in the face of fate, beauty constant under torture, are not merely passive.  They are a positive achievement, an explicit triumph; and the figure of Sebastian is the most beautiful symbol, if not of art as a whole, yet certainly of the art we speak of here.  Within that world of Aschenbach's creation were exhibited many phases of his theme: there was the aristocratic self-command that is eaten out within and for as long as it can conceals its biologic decline from the eyes of the world; the sere and ugly outside, hiding the embers of smouldering fire - and having power to fan them to so pure a flame as to challenge supremacy in the domain of beauty itself; the pallid languors of the flesh, contrasted with the fiery ardours of the spirit within., which can fling a whole proud people down at the foot of the Cross, at the feet of its own sheer self-abnegation; the gracious bearing preserved in the stern, stark service of form; the unreal, precarious existence of the born intrigant with its swiftly enervating alternation of schemes and desires - all these human fates and many more of their like one read in Aschenbach's pages, and reading them might doubt the existence of any other kind of heroism than the heroism born of weakness.  And, after all, what kind could be truer to the spirit of the times?  Gustave Aschenbach was the poet-spokesman of all those who labour at the edge of exhaustion; of the over-burdened, of those who are already worn out but still hold themselves upright; of all our modern moralizers of accomplishment, with stunted growth and scanty resources, who yet contrive by skilful husbanding and prodigious spasms of will to produce, at least for a while, the effect of greatness.  There are many such, they are the heroes of the age.  And in Aschenbach's pages they saw themselves; he justified, he exalted them, he sang their praise - and they, they were grateful, they heralded his fame.

      He had been young and crude with the times and by them badly counselled.  He had taken false steps, blundered, exposed himself, offended in speech and writing against tact and good sense.  But he had attained to honour, and honour, he used to say, is the natural goal towards which every considerable talent presses with whip and spur.  Yes, one might put it that his whole career had been one conscious and overweening ascent to honour, which left in the rear all the misgivings or self-derogation which might have hampered him.

      What pleases the public is lively and vivid delineation which makes no demands on the intellect; but passionate and absolutist youth can only be enthralled by a problem.  And Aschenbach was as absolute, as problematical, as any youth of them all.  He had done homage to intellect, had overworked the soil of knowledge and ground up her seed-corn; had turned his back on the 'mysteries', called genius itself in question, held up art to scorn - yes, even while his faithful following revelled in the characters he created, he, the young artist, was taking away the breath of the twenty-year-olds with his cynic utterances on the nature of art and the artist life.

      But it seems that a noble and active mind blunts itself against nothing so quickly as the sharp and bitter irritant of knowledge.  And certain it is that the youth's constancy of purpose, no matter how painfully conscientious, was shallow beside the mature resolution of the master of his craft, who made a right-about-face, turned his back on the realm of knowledge, and passed it by with averted face, lest it lame his will or power of action, paralyse his feelings or his passions, deprive any of these of their conviction or utility.  How else interpret the oft-cited story of The Abject than as a rebuke to the excesses of a psychology-ridden age, embodied in the delineation of the weak and silly fool who manages to lead fate by the nose; driving his wife, out of sheer innate pusillanimity, into the arms of a beardless youth, and making this disaster an excuse for trifling away the rest of his life?

      With rage the author rejects the rejected, casts out the outcast - and the measure of his fury is the measure of his condemnation of all moral shilly-shallying.  Explicitly he renounces sympathy with the abyss, explicitly he refutes the flabby humanitarianism of the phrase: ''Tout comprendre c'est tout pardonner.'  What was here unfolding, or rather was already in full bloom, was the 'miracle of regained detachment', which a little later became the theme of one of the author's dialogues, dwelt upon not without a certain oracular emphasis.  Strange sequence of thought!  Was it perhaps an intellectual consequence of this rebirth, this new austerity, that from now on his style showed an almost exaggerated sense of beauty, a lofty purity, symmetry, and simplicity, which gave his productions a stamp of the classic, of conscious and deliberate mastery?  And yet: this moral fibre, surviving the hampering and disintegrating effect of knowledge, does it not result in its turn in a dangerous simplification, in a tendency to equate the world and the human soul, and thus to strengthen the hold of the evil, the forbidden, and the ethically impossible?  And has not form two aspects?  Is it not moral and immoral at once; moral insofar as it is the expression and result of discipline, immoral - yes, actually hostile to morality - in that of its very essence it is indifferent to good and evil, and deliberately concerned to make the moral world stoop beneath its proud and undivided sceptre?

      Be that as it may.  Development is destiny; and why should a career attended by applause and adulation of the masses necessarily take the same course as one which does not share the glamour and the obligations of fame?  Only the incorrigible bohemian smiles or scoffs when a man of transcendent gifts outgrows his carefree apprentice stage, recognizes his own worth and forces the world to recognize it too and pay it homage, though he puts on a courtly bearing to hide his bitter struggles and his loneliness.  Again, the play of a developing talent must give its possessor joy, if of a wilful, defiant kind.  With time, an official note, something almost expository, crept into Gustave Aschenbach's method.  His later style gave up the old sheer audacities, the fresh and subtle nuances - it became fixed and exemplary, conservative, formal, even formulated.  Like Louis XIV - or as tradition has it of him - Aschenbach, as he went on in years, banished from his style every common word.  It was at this time that the school authorities adopted selections from his works into their textbooks.  And he found it only fitting - and had not thought but to accept - when a German prince signalized his accession to the throne by conferring upon the poet-author of the life of Frederick the Great on his fiftieth birthday the letters-patent of nobility.

      He had roved about for a few years, trying this place and that as a place of residence, before choosing, as he soon did, the city of Munich for his permanent home.  And there he lived, enjoying among his fellow-citizens the honour which is in rare cases the reward of intellectual eminence.  He married young, the daughter of a university family; but after a brief term of wedded happiness his wife had died.  A daughter, already married, remained to him.  A son he never had.

      Gustave von Aschenbach was somewhat below middle height, dark and smooth-shaven, with a head that looked rather too large for his almost delicate figure.  He wore his hair brushed back; it was thin at the parting, bushy and grey on the temples, framing a lofty, rugged, knotty brow - if one may so characterize it.  The nose-piece of his rimless gold spectacles cut into the base of his thick, aristocratically hooked nose.  The mouth was large, often lax, often suddenly narrow and tense; the cheeks lean and furrowed, the pronounced chin slightly cleft.  The vicissitudes of fate, it seemed, must have passed over his head, for he held it, plaintively, rather on one side; yet it was art, not the stern discipline of an active career, that had taken over the office of modelling these features.  Behind this brow were born the flashing thrust and parry of the dialogue between Frederick and Voltaire on the theme of war; these eyes, weary and sunken, gazing through their glasses, had beheld the blood-stained inferno of the hospitals in the Seven Years' War.  Yes, personally speaking too, art heightens life.  She gives deeper joy, she consumes more swiftly.  She engraves adventures of the spirit and the mind in the faces of her  votaries; let them lead outwardly a life of the most cloistered calm, she will in the end produce in them a fastidiousness, an over-refinement, a nervous fever and exhaustion, such as a career of extravagant passions and pleasures can hardly show.