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 Kro^ger, Aschenbach, Leverku^hn) 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 La^utner.