It is worth dwelling in some detail on the crisis of this story, because it brings together a number of characteristic elements and makes of them a curious, riddling compound obscurely but centrally significant for Mann's work.

The wife, Amra, and her lover are both savagely portrayed, she as incarnate sensuality, "voluptuous" and "indolent", possibly "a mischief maker", with "a kind of luxurious cunning" to set against her apparent simplicity, her "birdlike brain".
Lautner, for his part, "belonged to the present-day race of small artists, who do not demand the utmost of themselves", and the bitter description of the type includes such epithets as "wretched little poseurs", the devastating indictment "they do not know how to be wretched decently and in order", and the somewhat extreme prophecy, so far not fulfilled: "They will be destroyed".

The trick these two play upon Jacoby reveals their want not simply of decency but of imagination as well.
His appearance as Lizzy evokes not amusement but horror in the audience;
it is a spectacle absolutely painful, an epiphany of the suffering flesh unredeemed by spirit, untouched by any spirit other than abasement and humiliation.
At the same time the multiple transvestitism involved -- the fat man as girl and as baby, as coquette pretending to be a baby -- touches for a moment horrifyingly upon the secret sources of a life like Jacoby's, upon the sinister dreams which form the sources of any human life.

The music which Lautner has composed for this episode is for the most part "rather pretty and perfectly banal".
But it is characteristic of him, we are told, "his little artifice", to be able to introduce "into a fairly vulgar and humorous piece of hackwork a sudden phrase of genuine creative art".
And this occurs now, at the refrain of Jacoby's song -- at the point, in fact, of the name "Lizzy" --;
a modulation described as "almost a stroke of genius".
"A miracle, a revelation, it was like a curtain suddenly torn away to reveal something nude".
It is this modulation which reveals to Jacoby his own frightful abjection and, simultaneously, his wife's infidelity.
By the same means he perceives this fact as having communicated itself to the audience;
he collapses, and dies.

In the work of every artist, I suppose, there may be found one or more moments which strike the student as absolutely decisive, ultimately emblematic of what it is all about;
not less strikingly so for being mysterious, as though some deeply hidden constatation of thoughts were enciphered in a single image, a single moment.
So here.
The horrifying humor, the specifically sexual embarrassment of the joke gone wrong, the monstrous image of the fat man dressed up as a whore dressing up as a baby;
the epiphany of that quivering flesh;
the bringing together around it of the secret liaison between indolent, mindless sensuality and sharp, shrewd talent, cleverness with an occasional touch of genius (which, however, does not know "how to attack the problem of suffering");
the miraculous way in which music, revelation and death are associated in a single instant -- all this seems a triumph of art, a rather desperate art, in itself;
beyond itself, also, it evokes numerous and distant resonances from the entire body of Mann's work.

When I try to work out my reasons for feeling that this passage is of critical significance, I come up with the following ideas, which I shall express very briefly here and revert to in a later essay.

Love is the crucial dilemma of experience for Mann's heroes.
The dramatic construction of his stories characteristically turns on a situation in which someone is simultaneously compelled and forbidden to love.
The release, the freedom, involved in loving another is either terribly difficult or else absolutely impossible;
and the motion toward it brings disaster.

This prohibition on love has an especially poignant relation to art;
it is particularly the artist (Tonio Kroger, Aschenbach, Leverkuhn) who suffers from it.
The specific analogy to the dilemma of love is the problem of the "breakthrough" in the realm of art.

Again, the sufferings and disasters produced by any transgression against the commandment not to love are almost invariably associated in one way or another with childhood, with the figure of a child.

Finally, the theatrical (and perversely erotic) notions of dressing up, cosmetics, disguise, and especially change of costume (or singularity of costume, as with Cipolla), are characteristically associated with the catastrophes of Mann's stories.

We shall return to these statements and deal with them more fully as the evidence for them accumulates.
For the present it is enough to note that in the grotesque figure of Jacoby, at the moment of his collapse, all these elements come together in prophetic parody.
Professionally a lawyer, that is to say associated with dignity, reserve, discipline, with much that is essentially middle-class, he is compelled by an impossible love to exhibit himself dressed up, disguised -- that is, paradoxically, revealed -- as a child, and, worse, as a whore masquerading as a child.
That this abandonment takes place on a stage, during an 'artistic' performance, is enough to associate Jacoby with art, and to bring down upon him the punishment for art;
that is, he is suspect, guilty, punishable, as is anyone in Mann's stories who produces illusion, and this is true even though the constant elements of the artist-nature, technique, magic, guilt and suffering, are divided in this story between Jacoby and Lautner.

It appears that the dominant tendency of Mann's early tales, however pictorial or even picturesque the surface, is already toward the symbolic, the emblematic, the expressionistic.
In a certain perfectly definite way, the method and the theme of his stories are one and the same.

Something of this can be learned from "The Way To The Churchyard" (1901), an anecdote about an old failure whose fit of anger at a passing cyclist causes him to die of a stroke or seizure.
There is no more "plot" than that;
only slightly more, perhaps, than a newspaper account of such an incident would give.
The artistic interest, then, lies in what the encounter may be made to represent, in the power of some central significance to draw the details into relevance and meaningfulness.

The first sentence, with its platitudinous irony, announces an emblematic intent: "The way to the churchyard ran along beside the highroad, ran beside it all the way to the end;
that is to say, to the churchyard".
And the action is consistently presented with regard for this distinction.
The highroad, one might say at first, belongs to life, while the way to the churchyard belongs to death.
But that is too simple, and won't hold up.
As the first sentence suggests, both roads belong to death in the end.
But the highroad, according to the description of its traffic, belongs to life as it is lived in unawareness of death, while the way to the churchyard belongs to some other sort of life: a suffering form, an existence wholly comprised in the awareness of death.
Thus, on the highroad, a troop of soldiers "marched in their own dust and sang", while on the footpath one man walks alone.

This man's isolation is not merely momentary, it is permanent.
He is a widower, his three children are dead, he has no one left on earth;
also he is a drunk, and has lost his job on that account.
His name is Praisegod Piepsam, and he is rather fully described as to his clothing and physiognomy in a way which relates him to a sinister type in the author's repertory -- he is a forerunner of those enigmatic strangers in "Death In Venice", for example, who represent some combination of cadaver, exotic, and psychopomp.

This strange person quarrels with a cyclist because the latter is using the path rather than the highroad.
The cyclist, a sufficiently commonplace young fellow, is not named but identified simply as "Life" -- that and a license number, which Piepsam uses in addressing him.
"Life" points out that "everybody uses this path", and starts to ride on.
Piepsam tries to stop him by force, receives a push in the chest from "Life", and is left standing in impotent and growing rage, while a crowd begins to gather.
His rage assumes a religious form;
that is, on the basis of his own sinfulness and abject wretchedness, Piepsam becomes a prophet who in his ecstasy and in the name of God imprecates doom on Life -- not only the cyclist now, but the audience, the world, as well: "all you light-headed breed".
This passion brings on a fit which proves fatal.
Then an ambulance comes along, and they drive Praisegod Piepsam away.

This is simple enough, but several more points of interest may be mentioned as relevant.
The season, between spring and summer, belongs to life in its carefree aspect.
Piepsam's fatal rage arises not only because he cannot stop the cyclist, but also because God will not stop him;
as Piepsam says to the crowd in his last moments: "His justice is not of this world".

Life is further characterized, in antithesis to Piepsam, as animal: the image of a dog, which appears at several places, is first given as the criterion of amiable, irrelevant interest aroused by life considered simply as a spectacle: a dog in a wagon is "admirable", "a pleasure to contemplate";
another wagon has no dog, and therefore is "devoid of interest".
Piepsam calls the cyclist "cur" and "puppy" among other things, and at the crisis of his fit a little fox-terrier stands before him and howls into his face.
The ambulance is drawn by two "charming" little horses.

Piepsam is not, certainly, religious in any conventional sense.
His religiousness is intimately, or dialectically, connected with his sinfulness;
the two may in fact be identical.
His unsuccessful strivings to give up drink are represented as religious strivings;
he keeps a bottle in a wardrobe at home, and "before this wardrobe Praisegod Piepsam had before now gone literally on his knees, and in his wrestlings had bitten his tongue -- and still in the end capitulated".

The cyclist, by contrast, blond and blue-eyed, is simply unreflective, unproblematic Life, "blithe and carefree".
"He made no claims to belong to the great and mighty of this earth".

Piepsam is grotesque, a disturbing parody;
his end is ridiculous and trivial.
He is "a man raving mad on the way to the churchyard".
But he is more interesting than the others, the ones who come from the highroad to watch him, more interesting than Life considered as a cyclist.
And if I have gone into so much detail about so small a work, that is because it is also so typical a work, representing the germinal form of a conflict which remains essential in Mann's writing: the crude sketch of Piepsam contains, in its critical, destructive and self-destructive tendencies, much that is enlarged and illuminated in the figures of, for instance, Naphta and Leverkuhn.

In method as well as in theme this little anecdote with its details selected as much for expressiveness and allegory as for "realism", anticipates a kind of musical composition, as well as a kind of fictional composition, in which, as Leverkuhn says, "there shall be nothing unthematic".
It resembles, too, pictures such as Durer and Bruegel did, in which all that looks at first to be solely pictorial proves on inspection to be also literary, the representation of a proverb, for example, or a deadly sin.

"Gladius Dei" (1902) resembles "The Way To The Churchyard" in its representation of a conflict between light and dark, between "Life" and a spirit of criticism, negation, melancholy, but it goes considerably further in characterizing the elements of this conflict.

The monk Savonarola, brought over from the Renaissance and placed against the background of Munich at the turn of the century, protests against the luxurious works displayed in the art-shop of M. Bluthenzweig;
in particular against a Madonna portrayed in a voluptuous style and modeled, according to gossip, upon the painter's mistress.
Hieronymus, like Piepsam, makes his protest quite in vain, and his rejection, though not fatal, is ridiculous and humiliating;
he is simply thrown out of the shop by the porter.
On the street outside, Hieronymus envisions a holocaust of the vanities of this world, such a burning of artistic and erotic productions as his namesake actually brought to pass in Florence, and prophetically he issues his curse: "Gladius Dei super terram cito et velociter".