HOFFMANN, ERNST THEODOR WILHELM

HOFFMANN, ERNST THEODOR WILHELM, a German writer and artist of brilliant but wild and unregulated genius, was born at Königsberg in Prussia, Jan. 24, 1776. His misfortunes may be considered to have begun in his early childhood, for, when he was a mere infant, his father—a man of talent and high social standing, but of bad temper, and perhaps bad habits—separated himself from his wife, and never again took the least interest in her or any of her children. The charge of Young Hoffmann's education was undertaken by his uncle, a rigid methodical man, who lived by rule and square, and who wasted many hours in trying to train his frolicsome nephew to a clockwork life like his own. At a fitting age he was sent to the public school of Königsberg, where he displayed little aptitude for the classics, but much for music and drawing. From the school he passed to the university, where he listened to the lectures of Kant without understanding or profiting by them. Yet he wrought hard at his law studies, occupying his spare time in giving lessons in his favourite arts of music and drawing; and, after graduation, was appointed assessor of the court of Posen. In the gay society of this town, where his time was only half-occupied, he contracted those habits of dissipation which afterwards brought about his ruin. The abundant field for satire tempted him to use too freely that dangerous gift, and he found it convenient to retire for a time to Plozk, which, two years later, he was allowed to exchange for Warsaw. In the Polish capital he turned to profitable account his taste for music, and was beginning to prosper in the world, when the arrival of Napoleon and his legions once more threw him upon his wits. Failing in his attempt to support himself by any of the forms of art of which he was master, he became a stage director; and, when that resource failed, a miscellaneous writer. It was now that he began that series of essays after collected and published under the title of Fantasie-Stücke in Callot's Manier (Fancy-Pieces in the manner of Jacques Callot). The brilliancy and originality of these fancy pieces, which turned chiefly on music, soon made Hoffmann's name known, and procured him abundance of literary and other employment; but his life was still uncertain and chequered by the strangest vicissitudes, arising out of the French war, which in these years was devastating Germany. When peace was restored to that country on the overthrow of Napoleon, Hoffmann was reinstated in his legal appointments, and soon after published his Eliziere des Teufels, a two-volume novel, which enhanced his rapidly growing fame. But his success turned his head. He had always been vain, and now he became

Hoffmann, transcendently so; and as he had no sympathy with the dull conventions of society, he made himself a host of enemies by fierce and frequent defiance of them. In disgust he retired to the wine-house, where, in the company of outcasts like himself, he sought to drown his cares in the wildest orgies. "Strangers," says his most eloquent biographer, "came to Berlin to see him in the tavern. The tavern was his study, 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." In 1817 he published his Nacht-Stücke (Night-Pieces); and between 1819 and 1821, his Serpions-Brüder, comprising most of his minor tales and fugitive pieces. In 1820 and the following year appeared his Lebens-Aussichten des Kater Murr (Tom-Cat Murr's Philosophy of Life), his masterpiece, but which he did not live to finish. He died of a sort of paralysis, Jan. 24, 1822.

Hoffmann's natural powers were all but of the highest order, and, had they been under due control and guidance, might have done great things. He thought he had found his sphere in the poetry of art, which he loved with a deep though hardly with a pure love, as a source of refined enjoyment rather than as a fountain of beauty. Failing to find in it the heavenly peace which he longed for, he prostituted it to the purposes of an earthly excitement. Hence it is that his philosophy degenerates into bombast, and his magnanimity into levity; and his character equally with his writings became tawdry, false, and theatrical. His humour and his fancy, naturally racy and rich, became forced and grotesque; and all his other fine gifts were stultified besides by the incredible rapidity with which, for the most part, he was compelled to write. See Hoffmann's Life and Remains, published shortly after his death; and Carlyle's Miscellanies, vol. iii., p. 362.