# The Works of Thomas Carlyle/Volume 22/E. T. W. Hoffmann

E. T. W. HOFFMANN
Hoffmann's Life and Remains have been published, shortly after his decease, and with an amplitude of detail corresponding rather to the popularity than to the intrinsic merit of the subject; for Hoffmann belongs to that too numerous class of vivid and gifted literary men, whose genius, never cultured or elaborated into purity, finds loud and sudden, rather than judicious or permanent admiration; and whose history, full of error and perplexed vicissitude, excites sympathising regret in a few, and unwise wonder in many. From this Work, which is honestly and modestly enough written, and has, to all appearance, been extensively read and approved of, I borrow most of the following particulars.
Ernst Theodor Wilhelm Hoffmann was born at Konigsberg, in Prussia, on the 24th of January 1776. His father occupied a post of some dignity in the administration of Justice; the mother's relatives were also engaged in the profession of Law; most of them respectably, some of them with considerable influence and reputation. The elder Hoffmann is said to have been a man of talent; but his temper and habitudes were irregular; his wife was sickly, sensitive and perhaps querulous and uncompliant: in our Ernst their second child's third year, the parents discovered that they could not live together; and, apparently by mutual consent, dissolved their ill-assorted union. The father withdrew from Königsberg, to prosecute his legal and judicial engagements elsewhere; and seems to have troubled himself no farther about his offspring or old connexions: he died, several years after, at Insterburg, where he had been stationed as a Judge ​in the Criminal Court of the Oberland. The other parent retired with young Ernst to her mother's house, also in Konigsberg; and there, in painful inaction, wore out seventeen sick and pitiable years, before death put a period to her sufferings. Prior to the separation, the elder child, also a boy, had gone astray into wicked courses, and at last set forth as an infant prodigal into the wide world. The two brothers never met, though the elder is said to be still in life.
Cut off from his natural guardians and directors, young Hoffmann seems to have received no adequate compensation for the want of them, and his early culture was but ill conducted. The grandmother, like her daughter, was perpetually sick, neither of the two almost ever stirring from their rooms. An uncle, retired with the barren title of Justizrath from an abortive practice of Law, took charge of the boy's education: but little Otto had no insight into the endowments or perversities of his nephew, and spent much fruitless effort in endeavouring to train the frolicsome urchin to a clock-work life like his own; for Otto lived by square and rule; his history was a rigid, strenuous, methodical procedure; of which, indeed, except the process of digestion, faithfully enough performed, the result, in Otto's case, was nothing. An unmarried aunt, the only other member of the family, the only member of it gifted with any share of sense, appears to have had a truer view of young Hoffmann; but she loved the little rogue too well; and her tenderness, though repaid by equal and continued tenderness on his part, perhaps hurt him more than the leaden constraint of his uncle. For the rest, the boy did not let the yoke lie too heavy on his shoulders: Otto, it is true, was his teacher, his chamber-mate and bed-mate; but every Thursday the little Justizrath went out to pay visits, and the pupil could then celebrate a day of bedlam jubilee: in a little while too, by superiority of natural cunning, he had sounded the Justizrath; and from his twelfth year, we are told, he scarcely ever spoke a word with him, except for purposes of mystification. In ​this prim circle, he grew up in almost complete isolation; for, by reason of its fantastic strictness, the household was visited by few; and except one boy, a nephew of the Author Hippel's, with whom he accidentally became acquainted, Hoffmann had no companion but his foolish uncle and his too fond aunt. With young Hippel his intimacy more and more increased; and it is pleasant to record of both, that this early connexion continued unbroken, often warm and helpful, through many changes of fortune; Hoffmann's school-friend stood by his death-bed, and took his farewell of him with true heartfelt tears.
For classical instruction, he was early sent to the public school of Königsberg; but till his thirteenth or fourteenth year, he acquired no taste for these pursuits; and remained unnoticed by his teacher, and by all his schoolfellows, except Hippel, rather disrespected and disliked. Music and painting, in which also he had masters, were more to his taste: in a short while, he could fantasy to admiration on the harpsichord; and there was no comic visage in Königsberg which he had not sketched in caricature. His tiny stature (for in youth, as in manhood, he was little, and 'incredibly brisk') giving him an almost infantile appearance, added new wonder to these attainments; and so young Ernst became a musical and pictorial prodigy; to the no small comfort of Justizrath Otto, who delighted to observe that the little imp who had played him so many sorry tricks, and so often overset the steady machinery of his household economy, was turning out not a blackguard, but a genius.
With more prudence and regularity than could have been expected, Hoffmann betook himself, in due time, to preparing for the legal profession; to which, as if by hereditary destiny, he was appointed. In the Königsberg University, indeed, he confessed that Kant's prelections were a dead letter to him, though it was at that time the fashion both for the wise and simple to be metaphysically transcendental: but he abstained from the riotous practices of his fellow-bursche, and ​pursued with strict fidelity the tasks by which he hoped ere long to gain an independent livelihood, and be delivered from the thraldom of his grandmother and Justizrath Otto. In this hope he laboured; allowing himself no recreation, except once a-week an evening of literary talk with his fellow-student Hippel, and an occasional glance into Winkelmann, or other works on Art, to which, as formerly, the better part of his nature was passionately devoted.
In 1795, he passed his first professional trial, and was admitted Auscultator of the Court of Königsberg: an establishment administrative as well as judicial; in which, however, owing to the pressure of applicants, it was impossible to give him full employment. This leisure, which, with so hot and impatient a spirit, hung heavy enough on his hands, he endeavoured to fill up with subsidiary pursuits: he gave private lessons in music; he painted wild landscapes, or grotesque figures, to which 'a bold alternation of colour and shade' gave a specific character; he talked of men and things with the most sportful fancy, or the most biting sarcasm: in fine, he wrote two Novels. One of these, at least, he had hoped to see in print; for a bookseller had received it with some expressions of encouragement: but after half a year, his fair manuscript was returned to him all soiled and creased, with an answer, that 'the anonymity of the work was likely to hurt its sale.' In the mean time, his situation had become still more perplexed by a private incident in the style of the Nouvelle Héloïse. One of his fair music-pupils was too lovely and too soft-hearted: no marriage could be thought of between the parties, for she was far above him in rank; and the contradictions and entanglements of this affair so pained and oppressed him, that he longed with double vehemence to be out of Königsberg. At last, after much wavering and consulting, he snatched himself away, with a resolute, indeed almost heroic effort, from the unpropitious scene; and proceeded, in the summer of 1796, to Great Glogau in Silesia, where another uncle, a brother of Otto's, occupied a ​post in the Administration, and had promised to procure him employment.
In Great Glogau he did not find the composure which he was in search of; his uncle and his cousins treated him with great affection, and his labour was not irksome or unprofitable; but, in his letters, he complains incessantly of tedium, and other spiritual maladies; and, in 1798, he joyfully took leave of Silesia, following his uncle, who was now promoted to a higher legal post in Berlin. Here too the young jurist continued only for a short time. Having passed his third and last trial, the examen rigorosum, and this with no common applause, he was soon afterwards appointed Assessor of the Court at Posen, in South Prussia (Poland); whither he proceeded in March 1800.
With Hoffmann's removal to Poland begins a new era of his life: he was now director of his own actions, and unhappily he did not direct them well. At Berlin, and even at Great Glogau, he had been accustomed to enliven the routine of legal duty by the study of Art; for which the public collections of pictures, and the numerous professors of music, had in both cities afforded considerable opportunity. In Posen, these resources were abridged; there was little music, little painting; his official associates were dry weekday men, who worked hard at their desks, and lived hard when enfranchised from them; without taste for literature, or art of any kind, except it were the art of cookery and brewing. The Poles also were a lively, jolly people, and much addicted to 'strong Hungary wine.' Hoffmann yielded too far to the custom of the land; and here, it would seem, contracted habits of irregularity, from which he could never after get delivered. Another refuge against tedium, derived from his own peculiar resources, was even less to be excused. In private hours, he had condescended to become the scandalous chronicle of Posen, and to sketch a series of caricatures, exhibiting, under the most ludicrous yet recognisable aspects, ​a great number of individuals and transactions; sparing no rank or relation, where he fancied himself to have been provoked, or thought his satire might be expected to tell. On occasion of a masquerade, a gay companion, his future brother-in-law, equipped himself like an Italian hawker; and proceeding to the ball with this pestilent ware in his basket, distributed the pictures, each picture to some ill-wisher of the person whom it represented; and then vanished from the room. For the first half hour there was a general triumph; which, on comparing notes, passed into a general wail. The author was speedily detected: his talent, the only thing admirable in the transaction, betrayed him, and the punishment followed close on the offence. Intelligence was sent to Berlin; and the patent, lying ready for signature, which should have made him Bath (Councillor) at Posen, was changed for a similar appointment at Plozk; a change which, in all points, he regarded as an exile, but which his best friends could not help admitting that he had richly merited.
From Plozk he failed not to emit his Tristia; soliciting, with pressing earnestness, deliverance from this Polish Tomos. What was more to the purpose, he seems to have amended his conduct: he had married while at Posen; his wife, a fair Poless, was possessed of many graces, and of contentment and submissiveness without limit; and the husband was beginning to substitute the duties and enjoyments of domestic and studious life for the revelry and riot in which of late he had much too deeply mingled. In his official capacity, his assiduity and perseverance so far gained on his superiors, that at length, by the influence of Hippel and other friends, he was transferred from Plozk to Warsaw; after having spent two regretful but diligent and not unprofitable years in this provincial seclusion. In the summer of 1804, he hastened to his new destination, which his fancy had decked for him in all the colours of hope.
To Hoffmann, the Polish capital was like a vast perpetual ​masquerade; and for a time he enjoyed his exotic manycoloured aspect, the more from its contrast with his late way of life. His public duty was not difficult, and he performed it punctually; his salary sufficed him; there were theatres and music on every hand; and the streets were peopled with a motley tumult of the strangest forms: 'gay silken Polesses, talking and promenading over broad stately squares; the ancient venerable Polish noble, with moustaches, caftan, sash, and red or yellow boots; the new race equipped as Parisian Incroyables; with foreigners of every nation'; not excluding long-bearded Jews, puppetshow-men, monks and dancing-bears. In a little while, Hoffmann had formed some acquaintances among the human part of the throng; with one Hitzig, his colleague in office, he established a lasting intimacy. It began oddly enough: one day the two were walking home together from the Court, and engaged in laborious, stinted and formal conversation, when Hoffmann, asking the character of some individual, the other answered, in the words of Falstaff, that he was 'a fellow in buckram'; a phrase which enlightened the caustic visage of Hoffmann, at all times shy to strangers, and at once raised him into one of his brilliant communicative moods. This Hitzig, himself a man of talent and energy, was of great service in assisting Hoffmann's intellectual culture while at Warsaw, and stood by him afterwards in many difficult emergencies.
An enthusiast dilettante prepared a new source of interest to Hoffmann, by a scheme which he proposed of erecting a Musical Institution. By dint of great effort, the dilettante succeeded in procuring subscribers; first one deserted palace, then a larger one, was purchased for a hall of meeting: and Hoffmann, seeing that the scheme was really to take effect, now entered into it with heart and hand. He planned the arrangement of the rooms in the New Ressource: for their decorations, he sketched cartoons, part of which were painted by other artists, part he himself painted; not forgetting to introduce caricature portraits of many honest subscribers, ​whom, by wings and tails, he disguised as sphinxes, gryphons and other mythological cattle. His time was henceforth divided between his Court and this Musical Ressource: here, perched on his scaffold, among his paint-pots, with the brush in his hand, and a bottle of Hungary by his side, he might, in free hours, be seen diligently working, and talking in the mean while to his friends assembled below. If called to any juridical function by any extraordinary mandate from the President, he would doff his painter's-jacket, clamber down from his scaffold, wash his hands, and, to the surprise of parties, transact their business as rapidly and correctly, as if he had known no other employment.
The Musical Ressource prospered beyond expectation: brilliant concerts were given; all that was fairest and gracefulest in Warsaw attending, or even assisting: Hoffmann officiated as leader in their performance; and, especially in Mozart's pieces, was allowed to have done his part with consummate skill. Ere long, however, these melodious festivities were abruptly closed. News came of the battle of Jena; Russian foreposts entered the city; Tartars, Cossacks, Bashkirs increased the chaos of its population. In due time arrived French envoys to treat of a surrender; the Prussians mounted guard with their knapsacks on; and one morning tidings spread over the city, that the Praga bridge of boats was on fire, that the Russians and Prussians were retiring on the one side, and Murat's advanced-guard entering by the other. The rest is easy to conceive: the Prussian government was at an end in Warsaw; Hoffmann's Collegium honestly divided the contents of their strongbox, then closed the partnership, and dispersed, each whither he listed, to seek safety and new employment.
To most of them this was a grievous stroke: not to Hoffmann. For him Warsaw was still a fine variegated spectacle; he had money enough for present wants; of the future he took little heed, or thought loosely that he could live by Art, and that Art was far better than Law. Leaving his ​large house, where his purse seemed hardly safe from military violence, he took refuge in the garret of the Musical Ressource: here was his pianoforte and a library, here his wife and only child; without, were Napoleon and his generals, reviews, restaurateurs, theatres, churches with musical monks; and abundance of fellow-loungers to attend him in these amusements. It was not till after a severe attack of fever, and the most visible contraction of his purse, that he seriously bethought him what he was to do. A sad enough outlook! For Art, which had seemed so benignant at a distance, was shy and inaccessible when actually applied to for bread. Hitzig had hastened off to Berlin, and there opened a book-shop in hope of better times: but his accounts of musical profits in that city were discouraging; and for the journey to Vienna, which he advised and gave letters to forward, Hoffmann had now no funds. His uncle in Berlin was dead; from little Otto nothing could be drawn: the perplexity was thickening, and the means of unravelling it were daily diminishing. For the present, he resolved to leave his wife and daughter at Posen with their relations, and to visit Berlin himself in quest of some employment.
In Berlin he could find no employment whatever, either as a portrait-painter, a teacher or a composer of music; meanwhile the last remnant of his cash, his poor six Friedrichs-d'or, were one night filched from his trunk; and news came from Posen, that his little Cecilia was dead, and his wife dangerously ill. In this extremity, his heart for a while had nigh failed him; but he again gathered courage, and made a fresh attempt. He published in the newspapers an advertisement, offering himself as Music-director, on the most moderate terms, in any theatre; and was happy enough, soon afterwards, to make an engagement of the kind he wished with the managers of the Bamberg stage, at that time under the patronage of the Count von Soden.
To an ordinary temper, this very humble preferment would have offered but a mortifying contrast with former affluence ​and official respectability: Hoffmann, however, saw in it the means of realising his long-cherished wish, a life devoted to Art; and hastened to his Bamberg musical appointment with gayer hopes than he had ever fixed on any other prospect. Had money or economical comfort been his chief object, he must have felt himself cruelly disappointed: mischance on mischance befell the Bamberg theatre; contradiction on the back of contradiction awaited the new Music-director, whose life, for the next seven years, differs in no outward respect from that of the most unprosperous strolling player. Nevertheless, he made no complaint; perhaps he really felt little sorrow. 'This must do,' writes he in his Diary, 'and it will do; for now I shall never more have a Relatio ex Actis to write while I live, and so the Fountain of all Evil is dried up.' In a wealthier station, he might have composed more operas, and painted more caricatures; but it is possible enough the world might never have heard of him as a writer. The fate of his first two Novels had perhaps disgusted him with authorship: his studies at least had long pointed to other objects; nor was it choice, but necessity, which now led him back to literature. After many stagnations, the Bamberg theatrical cash-box had at length become entirely insolvent; portrait-painting and music-teaching were inadequate to the support of even a frugal household: Hoffmann, who, in all his straits, appears to have disdained pecuniary assistance, now wrote to Rochlitz of Leipzig, Editor of the Musicalische Zeitung (Musical Chronicle), soliciting employment in this Work; and, by way of testimonial, transmitting some of his recent performances. The letter itself, written with the most fantastic drollery, was testimonial enough: Hoffmann was instantly and gladly accepted; and in ten days, two essays were prepared and despatched; the first of a long series, afterwards collected, enlarged, and given to the world under the title of Fantasiestücke in Callot's Manier (Fantasy-pieces in the style of Callot), with a preface by Jean Paul ​Friedrich Richter, to whom Hoffmann had paid a visit while at Bamberg.
The incipient author was delighted with his new task; and Rochlitz and his readers no less so with its execution. These Fantasiestücke turning chiefly on Music, exclusively on Art, were afterwards to make him known to the world as a brilliant and peculiar writer; and they served for the present to augment his scanty funds, to bring him into favour and employment as a musical composer, and at last to deliver him from Bamberg. In 1813, by the management of Rochlitz, he formed an engagement at Dresden, again as Music-director, in the theatre of one Seconda. This appointment he hailed as a most propitious change; but his theatrical career was not destined anywhere to be smooth. Misfortunes, almost destruction, overtook him even on his journey: Seconda he soon found to be a driveller; the opera shifted from Dresden to Leipzig, and from Leipzig to Dresden; the country was full of Cossacks and Gendarmes, and Hoffmann's operatic melodies were drowned in the loud clang of Napoleon's battles. Till the end of 1814, he led a life more chequered by hard vicissitudes than ever: now quarrelling with Seconda, now sketching caricatures of the French; now writing Fantasies, now looking at Battles; sometimes sick, often in danger, generally light of heart, and always short of money. The Golden Pot, one of the Fantasiestücke, which follows this Introduction, was begun in Dresden, shortly before the Battle of Leipzig, while the cannon of the Allies was bombarding the city; with grenadoes bursting at the writers very hand, nay, at last driving him from his garret into some safer shelter.
The revolution of Europe, which restored so many sovereigns to their thrones, restored Hoffmann to his chair of office. He arrived at Berlin in September 1814; was provided with employment; reinstated in his former rights of
​seniority; and two years afterwards promoted, in consequence, to be Rath in the Kammergericht, or Exchequer Court of the capital.
Hoffmann's situation, after all his buffetings, might now be considered enviable: the income of his post was amply sufficient, and its labour not excessive; his best friends were in his neighbourhood, Hitzig was working with him at the same table; his public conduct was irreprehensible, and his literary fame was rapidly spreading. The Fantasiestücke were already universally popular; the Elixiere des Teufels (Devil's Elixir, a Novel in two volumes, since translated into English) had just been given to the circulating libraries; and his Opera of Undine, which Fouqué had versified for Hoffmann's music, was brought out on the Berlin stage with loud plaudits, and reviewed with praises by Weber himself. Hoffmann was happy; and had he been wise, might still have continued happy: but he was not wise, and in this cup of joy there lurked for him a deadly poison.
Berlin, like most other cities, prides itself in being somewhat of a modern Athens; and Hoffmann, the wonder of the day, was invited with the warmest blandishments to participate in its musical and literary tea. But in these polished circles Hoffmann prospered ill: he was sharp-tempered; vain, indeed, but transcendently vain; he required the wittiest talk or the most entire audience; and had a heart-hatred to inanity, however gentle and refined. When his company grew tiresome, he 'made the most terrific faces'; would answer the languishing raptures of some perfumed critic by an observation on the weather; would transfix half a dozen harmless dilettanti through the vitals, each on his several bolt; nay, in the end, give vent to his spleen by talking like a sheer maniac; in short, never cease till, one way or other, the hapless circle was reduced to utter desolation. To this intellectual beverage he was seldom twice invited; and ere long, the musical and literary Tea-urn was for him a closed fountain. ​Yet Hoffmann could not do without society, without excitement, and now not well without exclusive admiration. His old friends he had not forsaken, for he seldom, and with difficulty, got intimate with a stranger; but their quiet life could not content him: it was clear that the enjoyment he sought was only to be found among gay laughter-loving topers, as a guest at their table, or still better, as their sovereign in the wine-house. 'The order of his life, from 1816, downwards,' says his Biographer, 'was this: on Mondays and Thursdays he passed his forenoons at his post in the Kammergericht; on other days at home, in working; the afternoons he regularly spent in sleep, to which, in summer, perhaps he added walking: the evenings and nights were devoted to the tavern. Even when out in company, while the other guests went home, he retired to the tavern to await the morning, before which time it was next to impossible to bring him home.' Strangers who came to Berlin went to see him in the tavern; the tavern was his study, and his pulpit, and his throne: here his wit flashed and flamed like an Aurora Borealis, and the table was forever in a roar; and thus, amid tobacco-smoke, and over coarse earthly liquor, was Hoffmann wasting faculties which might have seasoned the nectar of the gods.
Poor Hoffmann was on the highway to ruin; and the only wonder is, that with such fatal speed, he did not reach the goal even more balefully and sooner. His official duties were, to the last, punctually and irreproachably performed. He wrote more abundantly than ever; no Magazine Editor was contented without his contributions; the Nachtstucke (Night-pieces) were published in 1817; two years afterwards Klein Zaches, regarded (it would seem falsely) as a local satire; and at last, between 1819 and 1821, appeared in four successive volumes, the Serapionsbrüder, containing most of his smaller Tales, collected from various fugitive publications, and combined together by dialogues of the Serapion-brethren, a little club of friends, which for some time met weekly in Hoff​mann's house. The Prinzessin Brambilla (1821) is properly another Fantasy-piece. The Lebensaussichten des Kater Murr (Tom-cat Murr's Philosophy of Life), published in 1820 and 1821, was meant by the author as his masterwork; but the third volume is wanting; and the wild anarchy, musical and moral, said to reign in the first two, may forever remain unreconciled.
Meanwhile, Hoffmann's tavern orgies continued unabated, and his health at last sunk under them. In 1819, he had suffered a renewed attack of gout; from which, however, he had recovered by a journey to the Silesian baths. On his forty-fifth birthday, the 24th of January 1822, he saw his best and oldest friends, including Hitzig and Hippel, assembled round his table; but he himself was sick; no longer hurrying to and fro in hospitable assiduity, as was his custom, but confined to his chair, and drinking bath-water, while his guests were enjoying wine. It was his death that lay upon him, and a mournful lingering death. The disease was a tabes dorsalis; limb by limb, from his feet upwards, for five months, his body stiffened and died. Hoffmann bore his sufferings with inconceivable gaiety; so long as his hands had power, he kept writing; afterwards, he dictated to an amanuensis; and four of his Tales, the last, Der Feind (The Enemy), discontinued only some few days before his death, were composed in this melancholy season. He would not believe that he was dying, and he longed for life with inexpressible desire. On the evening of the 24th of June, his whole body to the neck had become stiff and powerless; no longer feeling pain, he said to his Doctor: "I shall soon be through it now." "Yes," said the Doctor, "you will soon be through it." Next morning he was evidently dying: yet about eleven o'clock he awoke from his stupor; cried that he was well, and would go on with dictating the Feind that night; at the same time calling on his wife to read him the passage where he had stopt. She spoke to him in kind dissuasion: he was silent; he motioned to be turned towards ​the wall; and scarcely had this been done when the fatal sound was heard in his throat, and in a few minutes Hoffmann was no more.
Hoffmann's was a mind for which proper culture might have done great things: there lay in it the elements of much moral worth, and talents of almost the highest order. Nor was it weakness of Will that so far frustrated these fine endowments; for in many trying emergencies he proved that decision and perseverance of resolve were by no means denied him. Unhappily, however, he had found no sure principle of action; no Truth adequate to the guidance of such a mind. What in common minds is called Prudence, was not wanting, could this have sufficed; for it is to be observed, that so long as he was poor, so long as the fetters of everyday duty lay round him, Hoffmann was diligent, unblamable and even praiseworthy: but these wants once supplied, these fetters once cast off, his wayward spirit was without fit direction or restraint, and its fine faculties rioted in wild disorder. In the practical concerns of life he felt no interest: in religion he seems not to have believed, or even disbelieved; he never talked of it, or would hear it talked of: to politics he was equally hostile, and equally a stranger. Yet the wages of daily labour, the solace of his five senses, and the intercourse of social or gregarious life, were far from completing his ideal of enjoyment: his better soul languished in these barren scenes, and longed for some worthier home. This home, unhappily, he was not destined to find. He sought for it in the Poetry of Art; and the aim of his writings, so far as they have any aim, as they are not mere interjections, expressing the casual moods of his mind, was constantly the celebration and unfolding of this the best and truest doctrine which he had to preach. But here too his common failing seems to have beset him: he loved Art with a deep but scarcely with a pure love; not as the fountain of Beauty, but as the fountain of refined Enjoyment; he demanded from it not heavenly peace, but earthly excitement; as indeed through ​his whole life, he had never learned the truth that for human souls a continuance of passive pleasure is inconceivable, has not only been denied us by Nature, but cannot, and could not, be granted.
From all this there grew up in Hoffmann's character something player-like, something false, brawling and tawdry, which we trace both in his writings and his conduct. His philosophy degenerates into levity, his magnanimity into bombast: the light of his fine mind is not sunshine, but the glitter of an artificial firework. As in Art, so in Life he had failed to discover that 'agreeable sensations' are not the highest good. His pursuit of these led him into many devious courses, and the close of his mistaken pilgrimage was—the tavern.
Yet if, in judging Hoffmann, we are forced to condemn him, let it be with mildness, with justice. Let us not forget, that for a mind like his the path of propriety was difficult to find, still more difficult to keep. Moody, sensitive and fantastic, he wandered through the world like a foreign presence, subject to influences of which common natures have happily no glimpse. A whole scale of the most wayward and unearthly humours stands recorded in his Diary: his head was forever swarming with beautiful or horrible chimeras; a common incident could throw his whole being into tumult, a distorted face or figure would abide with him for days, and rule over him like a spell. It was not things, but 'the shows of things,' that he saw; and the world and its business, in which he had to live and move, often hovered before him like a perplexed and spectral vision. Withal it should be remembered, that, though never delivered from Self, he was not cruel or unjust, nor incapable of generous actions and the deepest attachment. His harshness was often misinterpreted; for heat of temper deformed the movements of kindness; mockery also was the dialect in which he spoke and even thought, and often, under a calm or bitter smile, he could veil the wounds of a bleeding heart. A good or a ​wise man we must not call him: but to others his presence was beneficent, his injuries were to himself; and among the ordinary population of this world, to note him with the mark of reprobation were ungrateful and unjust.
His genius formed the most important element of his character, and of course participated in its faults. There are the materials of a glorious poet, but no poet has been fashioned out of them. His mind was not cultivated or brought under his own dominion; we admire the rich ingredients of it, and regret that they were never purified, and fused into a whole. His life was disjointed: he had to labour for his bread, and he followed three different arts; what wonder that in none of them he should attain perfection? Accordingly, except perhaps as a musician, the critics of his country deny him the name of an Artist: as a poet, he aimed but at popularity, and has attained little more. His intellect is seldom strong, and that only in glimpses; his abundant humour is too often false and local; his rich and gorgeous fancy is continually distorted into crotchets and caprices. In fact, he elaborated nothing; above all, not himself. His knowledge, except in the sphere of Art, is not extensive; for an author, he had read but little; criticisms, even of his own works, he never looked into; and except Richter, whom he saw only once, he seems never to have met with any individual whose conversation could instruct or direct him. Human nature he had studied only as a caricature-painter: men, it is said, in fact interested him chiefly as mimetic objects; their common doings and destiny were without beauty for him, and he observed and copied them only in their extravagances and ludicrous distortions. His works were written with incredible speed, and they bear many marks of haste: it is seldom that any piece is perfected, that its brilliant and often genuine elements are blended in harmonious union. On the largest of his completed Novels, the Elixiere des Teufels, he himself set no value; and the Kater Murr, which he meant for a higher object, he did not ​live to finish, nor is it thought he could have finished it. His smaller pieces were mostly written for transitory publications, and too often with only a transitory excellence. We do not read them without interest, without high amusement; but the second reading pleases worst than the first: for there is too little meaning in that bright extravagance; it is but the hurried copy of the phantasms which forever masqueraded through the author's mind; it less resembles the creation of a poet, than the dream of an opium-eater.
With these faults a rigorous criticism may charge Hoffmann; and this the more strictly, the greater his talent, the more undoubted his capability and obligation to avoid them. At the same time, to reject his claim, as has been done, to what the poets call their immortality, seems hard measure. If Callot and Teniers, his models, still figure in picturegalleries; if Rabelais continues, after centuries, to be read, and even the Caliph Vathek, after decades, still finds admirers, the products of a mind so brilliant, wild and singular as that of Hoffmann may long hover in the remembrance of the world; as objects of curiosity, of censure, and, on the whole, compared with absolute Nonentity, of entertainment and partial approval. For the present at least, as a child of his time and his country, he is not to be overlooked in any survey of German Literature, and least of all by the foreign student of it.
Among Hoffmann's shorter performances, I find Meister Martin noted by his critics as the most perfect: it is a story of ancient Nürnberg, and worked up in a style which even reminds us of the Author of Waverley. Nevertheless, I have selected this Goldne Topf, as likelier to interest the English reader: it has more of the faults, but also more of the excellences peculiar to its author, and exhibits a much truer picture of his individuality. To recommend it, criticisms would be unavailing: there is no deep art involved in its composition; to minds alive to the graces of Fancy, and disposed to pardon even its aberrations when splendid and ​kindly, this Mährchen will speak its whole meaning for itself; and to others it has little or nothing to say. The most tolerant will see in it much to pardon; but even under its present disadvantages they may perhaps recognise in it the erratic footsteps of a poet, and lament with me that his course has ended so far short of the goal.