Hoffmann's Strange Stories/Life of Hoffmann
HOFFMANN.
D. Nisard.
Ernest-Theodore-Wilhelm Hoffmann was born in Prussia at Kœnigsberg, the 21st of January, 1776. His father occupied for more than thirty-six years the office of attorney-general and commissioner at Insterberg. His mother was the daughter of the consistorial advocate Dœrfer, a man of rare merit, and who was long entrusted with the affairs of nearly all the noble families of Silesia. She was a woman of feeble health and of a sad and romantic imagination.
The childhood and youth of Hoffmann were passed at Kœnigsberg, with his serious parents and two personages worthy of interest on account of the strange contrast offered by their characters: a stiff old uncle, bombastic, systematic, like the baron who figures in the tale of Fascination; and a young aunt called Sophia, a graceful mischief-maker, whom he often likes to remember, but who died in the flower of her age—a type of grace and beauty, whose every feature is reproduced in the charming creation of Seraphine. Hoffmann likes to recall the remembrance of all the beings and all the objects that he has met with during his life. Having been born poor and dying indigent, he wore out his days in a series of monotonous occupations, and the capricious escapes which he allowed to his mind in the imaginary world.
On leaving the university, he had but one friend, Hippel, who remained his Pylades, his fidus Achates until the end. Rich, he would have cultivated the arts with an immense affection; deprived as he was of all patrimony, his friends demonstrated to him that the study of the law could alone give him bread; he became a law student. But he often threw aside the Pandects and the Institutes to take by turns his pencil, his bow, or his pen. The supernatural already furrowed deep wrinkles on his youthful forehead, but his friend Hippel was as yet the only confidant of his adventurous dreams. These two beings, closely united, balanced each other marvellously well. Hoffmann prepared his flight, Hippel sustained him; one had the fire, the other the calm. Sometimes, on fixed days in the week, they admitted to this intimacy a few chosen friends, and they talked of poetry, art and love around a pot of beer or a bottle of Rhine wine. This was the origin of the Serapion club.
Meanwhile time was passing; Hippel, nominated for judiciary functions, left Kœnigsberg. Hoffmann became lonely and sad again. Chance developed a passion in his youthful heart; but the difference of social position, of rank and fortune, rendered impossible all hope for the future. Hoffmann's heart was broken. He fled in his turn from Kœnigsberg, which no longer contained for him either friend or love, and he went to Glogau to continue the study of the law. From there he went to Posen, invested with his first degree. The world then changed its aspect in his eyes. He sees it nearer, he is called upon to appreciate it,—to judge it under its various appearances. Strongly excited by everything around him, he throws aside his melancholy, sharpens his crayons, and begins to make caricatures of everything and everybody, so much and so well that a personage in high standing, more ill-treated than the others, writes to Berlin to complain of him, and raises a fatal bar to any legal career which poor Hoffmann might undertake. Meanwhile the caricatures had brought him to light, and his reputation as a wit procured for him in a short time the care of a family.
In 1804, we find Hoffmann married and counsellor to the regency of Warsaw. A new society, elegant and select, opens before him. The resources of a great city develop his activity, and give a broader course to his studies. He connects himself with men already famous, such as Voss and Zacharias Werner: and the referendary Hitzig became as dear to him as was Hippel at Kœnigsberg.
Hoffmann felt from that time the springs of life and the strength of intelligence redoubled within him. He composed music, made pictures and stories; a circle of celebrated people was formed about him. His position appeared stable and his future almost sure, when suddenly the French entered Warsaw, and drove out the Prussian government together with Hoffmann, Hitzig and company. The poor counsellor of the regency was sick with grief; then, when hardly convalescent and without resources, he drags himself as far as Berlin, solicits an office, and obtains nothing except rebuffs. By chance, he remembers that music may afford him some employment; his friend Hitzig succeeds in having him appointed as leader of the orchestra in the theatre at Bamberg. He sets off, his purse light, but his heart big with hope; he arrives:—but oh, fatality! the manager has gone off with the funds: the company in complete disorder no longer know upon what saint to call. Meanwhile, they must live, and to continue the representations without an orchestra, for want of money to pay the musicians, Hoffmann, instead of scratching notes, sets himself about composing a play. They play his piece, it succeeds; he gains nearly enough to keep him from starving to death. Once launched upon the sea of literature, he sends articles to the Leipsig journals: they are inserted, he is begged to continue his favors; but all this amounts to so little! Hoffmann was again about to resort to expedients, when a new manager came to Bamberg, Holbein, a man of probity, but bold, an innovator, and bent upon making a fortune or burying himself under the stage. Hoffmann, under his auspices, became machinist, architect and decorator of the theatre of Bamberg. The machine is again set in motion; it operates,—florins pour in, and parties of pleasure flock from all parts. But one of Holbein's caprices destroys this castle; he goes, and misery comes back to stand sentinel on the stage of the abandoned theatre. Hoffmann, driven to extremity, sells his last coat to enable him to wait until his friend Hitzig, his second providence, forwards him his commission as leader of the orchestra at Dresden. Now at Dresden, things go on no better than on his arrival at Bamberg; but, to console him, he finds there his faithful friend Hippel, and friendship makes him forget his misfortunes for a time.
We are in 1813; the dogs of war are let loose; Talma is playing French pieces at Dresden, and Hoffmann is working on the opera of Undine, and at the same time making caricatures for the bookseller Baumgartner, getting poorer from day to day. In 1814 his friend Hippel, who has made his way, reappears, and who, faithful to his attachment, does not give himself a moment's rest until he has caused the recall of Hoffmann to Berlin, where he finds Hitzig, and continues his functions of counsellor at the regency.
Here, then, ought to commence for him a new existence. Seven years of calm, are they not sufficient to heal the wounds that fate has cruelly made? Is it not time for Hoffmann to enjoy a little of the comforts of the fireside and the success of public life? Well, no! his destiny must be accomplished, like that which devotes to martyrdom whoever bears upon his forehead the sign of genius. Besides, the misery of the past has undermined his vital strength. To this prostration of the organs is joined attacks of paralysis of the extremities; then the invasion of a frightful malady, the spine disease, comes to render his situation without remedy and without hope of recovery. He vegetated five months in unspeakable suffering, which he bore with the resignation of a stoic. In the last days that preceded his death, the physicians tried to reanimate him by the application of cautery to each side of the back hone. Hitzig having come to visit him a short time after one of these painful operations, Hoffmann asked him "if he had not smelt, on entering, an odor of roast beef:" then he related in detail the proceedings of the doctor, adding, "That he imagined that they wished to stamp him, for fear that he should pass, as contraband, into paradise."
We read, in the excellent biography published by Mr. Loève Weimars, "that Hoffmann was small of stature; had a bilious complexion, thin nose, and arched, thin lips, dark hair, nearly black, which almost covered his forehead. His gray eyes had nothing remarkable in them when he looked tranquilly before him; but he sometimes gave them a tricky and scornful expression. His thin form was snugly built; his chest was broad and deep. In his youth, he dressed himself with care, without ever becoming elegant. Later he took much pleasure in wearing his counsellor's uniform, which was richly embroidered, and in which he resembled very nearly a general of the French army. What was the most striking in his person, was an extraordinary mobility, which increased when he was narrating. He spoke with great volubility; and, as his voice was husky, it was very difficult to understand him. He ordinarily expressed himself in short dry phrases. When he spoke of art and literature and became animated, his elocution was abundant and harmonious.
Hoffmann read badly: when he came to effective passages, he took an affected tone, taking good care to throw a glance among his auditors, as if to assure himself that he was understood, which habit often occasioned them much embarrassment. It was pretty difficult to form acquaintance with this strange man, but he was a firm friend. He did not like the society of women, and the hatred that he had sworn towards learned women often made him exceed the bounds of politeness.—When an authoress had the misfortune to make advances to him and came to seat herself near him at table, he took his plate and carried it to the other extremity. As for the men, he gave the preference to those who amused him, that is to say, to those who were quick at witty repartee, and knew how to relate anecdotes, or who took pleasure in listening to him. When he received company at his own house, Hoffmann was extremely pleasant. He bore then, with angelic patience, whims and follies which would have put him to flight under any other circumstances. His humor was of the most variable character: in his journal he has left a quantity of expressions by which he designated the different dispositions of mind that he remarked in himself; here are a few of them: romantic and religious humor; exalted humorous humor, resembling madness; exalted musical humor, romantic humor disagreeably exalted, capricious excess, purely poetic, very comfortable, stiff, ironical, very morose, excessively depressed, exotic, but miserable; "The purely poetic humor, in which," said he, "I felt a profound respect for myself."
Hoffmann was continually possessed with an idea which furnishes us in some measure with a key to his works. He had the conviction that evil is always hidden behind the good; or, as he expressed himself, that the devil had a hand in everything. His soul was continually a prey to fatal forebodings; he saw all the frightful figures that appear in his works, near him when he wrote; so that it often happened that he awoke his wife in the middle of the night, to beg of her to sit up in bed with her eyes open whilst he wrote. His writings bear the stamp of truth; in general there are few poets who offer so strong an identity with their creations.—The same writer who described terrible effects with so powerful an energy, excelled in satire and caricature, and he repaid himself for the terrors that shook his soul, by contemplating the mad creations that his imagination gave birth to, in his moments of calm and gaiety. Hoffmann attached no value to those of his productions in which the two distinctive qualities of his mind were not produced, as, for example, The Cooper of Nuremberg, the best of his works. His reading was very limited; he knew only the poets of the first class, and troubled himself very little about the new literature of the day. He drew the subject of his narrations from his imagination, from old chronicles, or from observations made in taverns and other places of resort that he frequented. The criticisms of the journalists caused him no emotion, and he rarely read them; the criticisms of his friends alone had any value in his eyes.
On the first appearance in France of the Strange Stories, the singularity of the work made a rapid fortune; but as a fatal law wills that to every genius a persecution is attached, those who called themselves the interpreters of Hoffmann miserably derided him; caricature nailed him, like another Silenus, astride a beer barrel; it enveloped him in the nauseous vapor of the bar room, it covered him with stains of wine, and, to shut out his book from good company, it made it the product of drunkenness and debauchery. It is time to protest against this odious lie, which had deceived Sir Walter Scott, at the same time the whole public, who are too ready to be deceived. The man the ignorant and jealous critics have so often calumniated, died the 25th of June, 1822, in the flower of his age, counsellor at Berlin. His life, destroyed by the long suffering of an acute disease, was extinguished in the midst of his wife and several friends, who yet live to honor the memory of the magistrate, the genius of the poet, and the souvenir of the virtues of the citizen.
Hoffmann was a man who knew life by experience; he had labored and suffered; he had exhausted, like many others, his part of the illusions of life. At the time he commenced writing his stories, he had lived three quarters of the time allotted to man; it was in 1814; the storms are passed, his position is assured, his rank is surrounded with honor and consideration; Germany has consecrated his genius as a writer; fame comes to him like glory, both dearly tax his leisure. But Hoffmann predominates over the world, he disdains its praises, he looks forgivingly on its seductions. Formerly he hated it for its hardness, now he sees it with its bitterness, with its ridiculousness, and he laughs at it. Retired henceforth into the circle of a few chosen men whose hearts have never betrayed his affections, with Chamisso, Contessa, Hitzig and doctor Koreff, he makes himself another world, of which they are the elect. Amongst them is organized the Serapion Club, thus called from the name that figured that day in the calendar. It was in those reunions that Hoffmann liked to exhaust his strangest inspirations.
Pour him out some prince's wine, let a flow of Johannisberg tint his glass with golden reflections, and the poet's imagination sets off at a gallop, like the courser who carried Burger's Leonora;—then springs forth all the train of strange beings, children of his wandering thoughts, that appear when he calls them, come, grow and range themselves before him. It is a drama that he raises between heaven and earth;—it is his world, peopled with personages whose secret he alone possesses. Pour out for the poet a flow of Johannisberg, and his thought, so many times trodden down by the dry pre-occupations of daily labor, so many times ruffled by trust deceived, becomes illumined with a magic brilliancy; the scene becomes enlarged, all the arts furnish their part to the work; painting brings its lively colors; music its trembling vibrations; poetry its secret treasures. Pour out Johannisberg, and life fires the drama! Advance on this new earth, amongst these personages that you have nowhere seen, and that you seem nevertheless to recollect; all the most diverse emotions will surprise and fascinate you.
Listen to the melancholy echo of Antonia's Song, immediately you are bursting with laughter at the relation of the Lost Reflection;—then a delicious curiosity drags you on to the last page of the Walled-up Door; farther on, all the spirit, all the elegance of the age of Louis XIV. shines in the description of manners which serves as a frame to Cardillac the Jeweller;—do you wish for comedy in real life, read the Agate Heart:—do you wish for the strange in its highest perfection, take Coppelius or Berthold the Madman. At whatever page the book is opened, there is instruction for things in life. By the side of the wanderings of a burning imagination, is found at every line an observation of the world, which mingles all the delicacy of a criticism in good taste with the traits which prove the most intimate acquaintance with the human heart:—the moral deduction is never separated from the marvellousness of the form.