Page:Hoffmann's Strange Stories - Hoffman - 1855.djvu/14

 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.