of existence, between the arts, and between reality and unreality.  Hoffmann, with all his North German power of reasoning and his zeal and conscientiousness in public office, was emphatically that Romanticist associated with the night-sides of literature and life.  There is something uncanny both in the man and his writings.  His power of putting the scene of his most unreal stories in the midst of well-known places, his ability to shift the reader from the real to the unreal and vice versa, make some of his stories seem like phantasmagorias.

In all of Hoffmann’s stories there is some unpleasant, bizarre character; this is the author’s satire on his own strange personality.  There is none of Poe’s objectivity in Hoffmann, but he uses his subjectivity in a peculiarly Romantic fashion.  It is his idea to raise the reader above the every-day point of view, to flee from this to a magic world where the unusual shall take the place of the real and where wonder shall rule.  So there are in Hoffmann’s stories a series of characters who are really doubles.  To the uninitiated they seem every-day creatures; to those who know, they are fairies or beings from the supernatural world.  Such characters are found at their best in The Golden Pot.

Hoffmann has influenced both French and English literatures more than any other Romantic poet.  Hawthorne and Poe read him, and he was felt by the French to be one of the first Germans whom they understood.  It was not merely that his clear reason appealed to the French, but that they saw in him one endowed as with a sixth sense.  He has a fineness of observation, especially for the ridiculous sides of humanity, together with a tenderness of spirit, that was new in German literature as such men as Sainte-Beuve and Gautier saw it.  The soul at war with itself, uncovering its most secret thoughts, the "malheur d’etre poete," coupled with wit, taste, gaiety, and the comedy spirit—­all these the French found in Hoffmann as in no other German.  Poe was also influenced by Hoffmann, but Poe’s whole world is the supernatural, and where Hoffmann slips with fantastic but logical changes from the real to the unreal, Poe’s metempsychosis is the real in his world and he has a deeper insight into the world of terror.  The difference between Hawthorne and Hoffmann is even more striking, for in the American the supernatural is the embodiment of the Puritan New England conscience.  In Hoffmann there is no such elevation of the moral world to the rank of an atmosphere.

In Hoffmann there is no out-of-doors, no lyric love; some of his characters are frankly insane.  The musical takes on a supreme significance among the sensations, and music seemed the only art which was able to draw the soul of the man from his earth-bound habitation.  Only in music did Hoffmann find the ability to make the Romantic escape from the homelessness of this existence to the all-embracing world of the unreal.  But too often in his works does the unreal fail to satisfy the reader.  There is an effort felt, an effect sought for, and, while the amalgamation of the two worlds is perfect, the world to which Hoffmann is able to take us proves to be without the cogency which our imaginations expect.  Here Hoffmann fails.  His world of the imagination cannot always be taken seriously.