Page:Hoffmann's Strange Stories - Hoffman - 1855.djvu/15

 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.