His talent, equally remote from the commonplace and from the eccentric, had a native capacity both to inspire confidence in the general public and to win admiration and encouragement from the discriminating connoisseur. Ever since his boyhood the duty to achieve – and to achieve exceptional things – had been imposed on him from all sides, and thus he had never known youth’s idleness, its carefree negligent ways. When in his thirty-fifth year he fell ill in Vienna, a subtle observer remarked of him on a social occasion: ‘You see, Ashenbach has always only lived like this’ – and the speaker closed the fingers of his left hand tightly into a fist – ‘and never like this’ and he let his open hand hang comfortably down along the back of the chair. It was a correct observation; and the morally courageous aspect of the matter was that Ashenbach’s native constitution was by no means robust, that the constant harnessing of his energies was something to which he had been called, but not really born.