evening performances and composing music for them, that he hardly knew
anything of the dark thunder-cloud of war that was gathering in the
West until the news of the fateful battle of Jena came; but upon these
music enthusiasts in Warsaw even this intelligence made no perceptible
impression. Their concerts and practisings and meetings went on
uninterruptedly just as before, until one fine day the advanced guard
of the Russian army rode into the streets of the former Polish capital.
Soon after the Russian general had taken up his quarters in Praga,
close to Warsaw, there appeared on the other side of the town the
pioneers of the great army of Napoleon. The Prussians and Russians
withdrew from the town. Milhaud arrived with the main body of Murat's
forces; in Napoleon's name the Prussian Government was dissolved, and
its officials were superseded by native Poles. Hence Hoffmann was left
without employment. He and his colleagues divided the contents of the
treasury between them to prevent its falling into the hands of the
French; this secured them from want for the present. Careless about the
future, and revelling in the luxury of untrammelled freedom, Hoffmann
was now perfectly happy. The excitement was like rich wine to his
brilliant fancy; he never had enough of it. He spent all the livelong
day in running about seeing and hearing the many remarkable things to
be both seen and heard. And the little, restless, energetic man was
like quicksilver; he was everywhere. He specially loved to frequent the
theatres, where, before the curtain rose, conversations might be heard
carried on in ten or a dozen living tongues at once. Pushing his way
through the motley throng, he penetrated to every part of the house,
busy gathering all sorts of rich observations, and storing up a most
varied assortment of experiences; and nothing escaped his falcon eye or
remained unnoticed by his keen perception. Many and exquisite were the
humorous anecdotes he picked up, the gestures he copied, the tricks and
eccentricities he caught, the extraordinary characters he understood
and fathomed at a glance; and these experiences he afterwards retailed
to his friends, to their unbounded delight.
But amid all the tumult of the French occupation of the city, the
evenings at the Musical Ressource still went on the same as ever.
Hoffmann indeed, in order to escape the burdens of billeting as well as
from motives of economy, took up his residence in one of the attics of
the Ressource, where, though somewhat straitened for accommodation (for
he had his wife, a niece aged about twelve, and a little baby daughter
with him), he was as happy and contented as he well could be. He had
the rich library of the Ressource at command, and his own piano stood
in one of its rooms; and "that was all he wanted to make him forget the
French and the future." Early in 1807, he took advantage of a
favourable opportunity and sent his wife and the two children to her
friends in Posen; Hitzig also, and his family, and most other friends,
left Warsaw in March of that year: thus Hoffmann was left almost alone.
Soon afterwards he was attacked by a grave nervous disorder, but
successfully nursed through it by the one or two friends who still
remained in the city. On recovering, he wished to go to Vienna, with
the view of beginning an artistic career, and was only prevented from
carrying out his design by want of money to defray the expenses of the
journey. He was in great distress, and even began to despond, until
finally in the summer he contrived to get to Posen, and thence to
Berlin, where he arrived some time in July.
In Berlin, however, his prospects did not improve. He failed to find
employment for his talents: nobody could be got to purchase his
sketches or sit to him for a portrait; an attempt to interest Iffland,
the actor and dramatist, in him failed; and no publisher could be found
for his musical productions. Everything he was willing to do came to
nothing. Then came other misfortunes. His ready-money, consisting of
six _Louis d'or_, was stolen from him; news reached him of the death of
his dearly-loved daughter Cecily when two years old, and of the illness
of his wife. He was on the point of despair, when it suddenly occurred
to him to advertise for the post of musical director in a theatre. This
had the desired effect of eventually securing him the post he wished,
in the theatre at Bamberg which was conducted under the auspices of
Count von Soden; but the engagement was not to commence until October,
1808. The intervening months were months of hard struggle for Hoffmann;
he says he was almost in the extremities of want, and should have
lacked the bare necessaries of life had he not succeeded in disposing
of some minor productions in music and painting for a couple of _Louis
d'or_ received in advance. In the summer of 1808, he at last fetched
his wife from Posen, and then repaired to Bamberg (1st September).
To these years in Warsaw and Berlin belong three operas and other minor
musical pieces (including music for Werner's tragedy _Das Kreuz an der
Ostsee_), several productions of his pencil and brush, but no literary
works. Here at the end of what may be termed the first act in E. T. W.
Hoffmann's chequered life we may pause a moment And the pause we may
turn to account by quoting a description of his personal appearance and
some peculiarities of habit.
"Hoffmann was very short of stature, of yellowish complexion; and he
had dark, almost black hair, growing down low upon his forehead, gray
eyes which had nothing remarkable about them when they were at rest,
but which assumed an uncommonly humorous and cunning expression when he
blinked them, as he often did. His nose was thin and of the Roman type,
and his mouth tightly closed.
"Notwithstanding his agility, his body seemed to be capable of
endurance, for in contrast with his size his breast was high and his
shoulders broad.
"During the earlier part of his life his dress was sufficiently
elegant, without falling into foppery. The only thing he set great and
special store by was his whiskers, which he carefully cut so as to form
a point against the corners of his mouth....
"What particularly struck the eye in his exterior was his extraordinary
vivacity of movement, which rose to the highest pitch when he began to
narrate anything. His manners at receiving and parting from people--
repeated quick short bendings of the neck without moving the head--had
a good deal that appeared to partake of the nature of caricature, and
might very readily have been taken for irony had not the impression
made by his singular gestures on such occasions been softened by his
cordial warmth of manner.
"He spoke with incredible quickness and in a somewhat hoarse voice, so
that he was always very difficult to understand, especially during the
last years of his life, when he had lost some of his front teeth. When
relating he always spoke in quite short sentences; but when the
conversation turned upon art matters and he got enthusiastic--against
which, however, he seemed to guard himself--he employed long and finely
rounded periods. If he were reading any of his own compositions aloud--
whether literary or official--he hurried over the unimportant parts at
such a rate that his listeners had hard work to follow him; but those
places which are called 'strong touches' in a picture he emphasised
with almost comic pathos; he screwed up his mouth as he read, and
looked round to see if his listeners caught the points, so that he
often upset both his own and their equilibrium. Owing to this habit he
was conscious that he did not read well, and was always uncommonly
pleased if anybody else would relieve him of the task; this, however,
was a ticklish thing to do, especially in the case of MSS. copy, for
every word read falsely or every hesitating glance upon a word to make
sure what it was went like a knife to his heart, and this effect he
could not conceal. As a singer he was a fine powerful tenor."14
To Bamberg Hoffmann went with high hopes of being able to realise the
dreams of his life; but his fond expectations were doomed to the
bitterest disappointment. His post he barely retained two months. The
theatre circumstances were on an exact par with those described in _
Wilhelm Meister_ (_videatur_ the name Melina, &c.). Hoffmann's style of
directing gave offence to the Bamberg public on the very first evening;
Count von Soden had placed the management of the theatre in the hands
of a certain Cuno, whose affairs were so embarrassed that he never, or
only seldom, paid his officials, and finally became insolvent in
February, 1809. The disappointed director, embittered against the
public by his failure to recommend himself to them, supported himself
and his wife by composing the incidental music for the various pieces
given at the theatre, at a small monthly salary (of which he received
but little), and by giving music lessons in many of the best families
of the town. But the war approaching that district of Germany caused
many of these families to leave the place; and Hoffmann began to be in
embarrassed circumstances. Then he wrote an extremely droll letter to
Rochlitz, the editor of the _Musicalische Zeitung_ at Leipsic, was
taken on as a contributor, and continued to work for this magazine all
the time he was in Bamberg--producing mostly reviews and criticisms of
musical works, and writing fugitive pieces of musical interest. He also
composed several pieces of music of various descriptions independently
of those which he wrote for the theatre. Nor was his brush idle, for he
received several commissions for large family pictures. Thus things
went on until the summer of 1809, when a brighter cloud dawned upon him
for a time. One fine summer evening he made the acquaintance of Kunz, a
bookseller, publisher, and wine-dealer, at the pleasure-resort of Bug
(close to Bamberg) in a characteristic manner. Kunz, an honest, jovial,
good-natured giant, not lacking humour and gifted with a remarkable
talent for mimicry and imitation, became little Hoffmann's fast
friend--nay, his only real friend--during the whole of the time the
latter remained in Bamberg. They were almost inseparable, associated in
all amusements and diversions: they spent many long winter evenings
together in pouring out their hearts and experiences to each other in
mutual confidences, and many long summer evenings at the "Rose," where
according to German custom a throng of visitors gathered to spend the
hours between closing business and going to bed. In July, 1810,
Holbein, Hoffmann's Glogau friend, came to undertake the management of
the Bamberg theatre. This, of course, could not fail to be of advantage
to Hoffmann, who, though he did not resume his post of musical
director, yet received a permanent engagement to act in a multitude of
departments: he was musical composer, architect, scene-painter, part
comptroller of the financial arrangements, and director of the
repertoire, &c. Under Holbein's management the theatre rose to a
flourishing level; classic operas and good plays15 were introduced with
success, to which the versatile talents of Hoffmann largely
contributed. In the evenings the choice spirits of Bamberg, mostly of
theatrical and artistic connection, used to assemble in the "Rose,"
where Hoffmann was the soul of the party, his genius, wit, irony, and
drollery being inexhaustible. Whilst sending out flashes of sarcastic
wit or gleams of exquisite humour, he would clench a droll or clever
description by quickly embodying his thoughts and words in impromptu
sketches, which were handed round to the company. Music and singing,
often by the actors and actresses, also added to the entertainment of
the evening. Mine host of the "Rose" saw his company increased by some
scores of visitors when it was known that the inimitable sharp-eyed
little music-director was going to be present; and he used to send
across (Hoffmann lived the other side of the street only) during the
day to inquire if he intended being there in the evening. But on the
whole, Hoffmann was more generally feared than loved, or even
respected, by the main body of the townsfolk. His vanity was openly
displayed; he must lead the conversation, and everybody else must fall
in with his humour and his whim, or they might expect some marked
rudeness from his bitter tongue; and the fellow had a confoundedly
sharp tongue, and no less sharp a pen and pencil. The most wonderful
things were said about him in the town, and to those not intimate with
him or who did not know him personally, he was a man to be gazed at
from a distance; it was hardly safe to seek his acquaintance, although
his talk was said to be something extraordinary, and his gestures and
grimaces irresistibly diverting, yet he could also launch stinging
barbs and on occasion utter insulting sarcasms. In fact the outside
public were wont to regard him as invested with a nimbus of wonder, or
even as a sort of dæmonic being. Though these evenings were beyond all
conception gay and festive, Hoffmann seldom drank to excess. Of course
he drank a good deal: he had acquired the habit, as remarked, at Posen,
but he was not a common drinker, who drinks for the drink's sake. It
was the exhilaration it gave to his spirits and the fire it gave to his
mind and brilliant parts that he found attractive in the habit.16
Excursions were also made into the country, particularly to Bug; and
here, as at Warsaw, the restless "quicksilver" man was everywhere.
In March, 1811, he was fortunate to be introduced to Von Weber the
musician, whose regard for his musical talents continued undiminished
until his death; and in the same month Hoffmann paid a visit to Jean
Paul at Bayreuth, and had from him a fairly cordial reception. Towards
the end of the year came the intelligence that his uncle Otto Dörffer
of Königsberg had died, leaving him heir to his property. But the sum
Hoffmann received barely sufficed, if indeed it did suffice, to pay his
debts. These had been accumulated first by Hoffmann's own want of
prudence--when he had money in his purse he spent it merrily without a
thought about the morrow--and secondly, by the frequent illness of his
wife, the simple, homely, unassuming, good-natured creature with whom
he always lived on happy terms in spite of his own unpardonable
vagaries. Curiously enough, he used to labour under the odd delusion
that she was gifted with keen critical taste and was an intellectual
woman, though this was far from being the truth, according to the
express evidence of his bosom-friend Kunz.
Amongst Hoffmann's pupils was a young girl of sixteen, Julia M----;
this was his favourite pupil. For her he came to conceive an
overmastering passion; but whether it was more of the imagination or of
the heart it would appear difficult to decide with absolute certainty.
He did not know himself; "he preferred to remain a riddle to himself, a
riddle which he always dreaded to have solved;" and he demanded from
his friend Kunz that he should look upon him as a "sacred inexplicable
hieroglyph." The girl, who was pretty and amiable, of good
understanding, and of child-like deportment towards her music-master,
never for a single moment dreamt of such a thing as his passion for
her, and so of course she never consciously encouraged it in any way.
She did not even show any signs of possessing a dreamy or poetic
temperament, or seem to be inclined to sentimentality, so that
Hoffmann's extraordinary infatuation can only be explained as a "fixed
insanity." At any rate, it powerfully affected his mind, and left an
indelible trace upon him almost down to his dying day. The day on which
her betrothal to a stupid, weak-minded man, a man in all respects
unworthy of her, was celebrated at the pleasure-resort of Pommersfelden
(four hours from Bamberg), was one which shook Hoffmann's storm-tossed
soul to its profoundest depths. He had hated himself for his weakness,
and yet could not or would not manfully resolve to break through it.
Now he was compelled to do so, and in a way that was galling to the
utmost degree. Her marriage turned out an unhappy one; and eight years
later, that is two years before his death, hearing she was in great
trouble, he sent many kind messages to her through a mutual friend.
These relations are detailed with striking truth and fidelity in the _
Nachricht von den neusten Schicksalen des Hundes Berganza_, published
in the _Fantasiestücke in Callot's Manier_ (1814-15). Perhaps, if we
sufficiently compare the descriptions which he gives of various
heroines in his tales (all of which were written after this time),17
and bear in mind the common characteristic running through them all,
namely, that he puts them before us more as individual pictures than as
developments of character, giving us purely objective sketches of them
after the manner of a painter--if we compare these descriptions with
what we know of Hoffmann's mind and character, his restless, brilliant
imagination, and the taint of sensuousness that helped to mar its
purity, his keen eye for beauty in form and colour, his strong talent
for seeing the things with which he came in contact through an
unmistakable veil of either love or hatred, we may perhaps hazard the
opinion, without risk of going far wrong, that it was his imagination--
the imagination that made up such a large part of the man--that was
principally concerned in this remarkable passion; if his heart was also
touched, as it would undoubtedly appear to have been, the road to it
must no less undoubtedly have been found through his imagination.
Early in 1812 Hoffmann was invited to a banquet at the monastery of the
Capuchins; and the visit made an extraordinary impression upon him. All
during dinner he could not keep his eyes off a gray-haired old monk
with a fine antique head, genuine Italian face, strong-marked features,
and long snow-white beard. On being introduced to Father Cyrillus he
asked him innumerable questions about the secrets of monastic life,
especially about those things of which "we profane have only dim
guesses, no clear conceptions." They got into a poetic and exalted
frame of mind, and rose just as it was getting dusk to inspect the
chapel and crypt, and other objects of interest. In the crypt Hoffmann
was powerfully agitated: he reverently doffed his hat, his wine-heated
face became terribly pale, and he visibly showed that he was held in
the thraldom of supernatural awe. When Father Cyrillus went on to point
out the spot where his own mortal remains should rest, and to indulge
in certain pious exhortations to them (Hoffmann and Kunz) to shed a
tear upon his grave if they should come there again in after years,
Hoffmann lost control of himself; he stood like a marble pillar, his
face and eyes set, his hair standing on end, unable to utter a word.18
Then making a gesture upwards he hurried out of the crypt with hasty
uncertain steps. The impressions made upon him by this visit, and the
observations he gathered, he employed in the _Elixiere des Teufels_ and
_Kater Murr_ (pt. II.), the meeting between _ Kapellmeister_ Kreisler
and Father Hilarius, as well as the description of the monastery and
its situation in the latter, being invested with a fine poetic flavour.
The scene in the crypt points to another side of Hoffmann's character,
or rather personality, which hitherto has not been alluded to. In fact,
it does not seem, as far as can be gathered from the biographical
sources, that it began to be strongly developed until the Bamberg
period. We have seen how that early in life he conceived a decided
antipathy to the prosaic and the commonplace, and his career up to this
point furnishes abundant evidence that he hated with a genuine hatred
to keep in the ruts of custom and conventionality, as if bound to do so
because such was prescribed by custom and conventionality. His
sentiments he never concealed, and his actions harmonised, almost
without exception, strictly with his sentiments; for one of his most
striking and instructive characteristics was the remarkable
fearlessness which he displayed no less in his actual conduct than in
his habits of thought. Affectation was far from him; thorough
genuineness was stamped upon all he did, showing unmistakably that it
came direct from the man himself. In fact it might be said, with
special significance, that his inner and his outer life--the in other
cases invisible life of the soul and the visible life in action--were
perfectly correlated, if not one and indivisibly the same. Being then
thus honest with himself,19 and detesting as he did all that was
commonplace and wearying, fiat and stale and dull, it is no wonder that
he should tend to fall into the opposite extreme, and should delight in
the unusual, the singular, the extraordinary. Further, when we remember
his fine imaginative powers, his inimitable humour, his vanity, his
poetic cast of mind, his bitterness against the public for not
appreciating his musical talents, and his consequent fits of fierce
defiance and satiric gloom, there is still less cause for wonder when
we find this propensity for seeking the uncommon and the marvellous
deepening and developing in time into an unconquerable penchant for
what was grotesque and eccentric, for what was fantastic, unnatural,
ghostly, and horrible. He loved to occupy his fancy most with the
extremes of human action, and to dive down into the most secret and
unexplored recesses of human nature to bring back thence some wild
startling trait that scarce any other imagination save his own would
have discovered. If he ever studied human nature at all, it was along
the border-lands of rationality; those misty shadowy states, such as
insanity, monomania, and hypochondriacal somnambulism, where the soul
hardly knows itself and loses touch of reality and almost of self-
consciousness. These and the like mysterious states of being exercised
a strange fascination upon his spirit. He was constantly pursued by the
idea that some secret and dreadful calamity would happen to him, and
his mind was often haunted by images of awful form and by "doubles" of
himself and others. He even believed he saw visions with his own bodily
eyes, and no expostulations of his friends could drive this belief out
of his head. Not only when he was engaged in writing, but even in the
midst of an ordinary conversation, at supper, or whilst drinking a
social glass of wine or rum, he would suddenly exclaim, "See there--
there--that ugly little pigmy--see what capers he cuts. Pray don't
incommode yourself, my little man. You are at liberty to listen to us
as much as you please. Will you not approach nearer? You are welcome."
(Here, and occasionally, he would accompany his words with violent
muscular contortions of the face.) "Pray what will you take? Oh! don't
go, my good little fellow." All this, or similar disconnected phrases,
he used to utter with his eyes fixed and riveted upon the place where
he affirmed he saw the vision; and if his word was doubted or he was
laughed at as a stupid foolish man, he would knit his brows and with
great earnestness reiterate his assertions and appeal to his wife to
support him, saying, "I often see them, don't I, Mischa" (Misza,
Mischa, short form for the Polish name Michaelina)?
This side of Hoffmann's individuality is not only one of the most
characteristic of him, it is necessary to grasp it in order to
understand his written works. These remarks will also serve to make
more intelligible the sensation aroused in Hoffmann the evening he was
at the Capuchin monastery. It is in the _Elixiere des Teufels_ that
these noteworthy traits find in most respects their fullest expression.