Collected Works of A. I. Herzen, Volume 4

There, the spirit is still well-trained,
Laced into Spanish boots original: "In Spanische Stiefeln eingeschnürt", a reference to a torture device, metaphorically representing rigid academic constraint ¹).

He becomes gloomy, for he begins to discern the actual world in all its prose, in all its trivialities; this is a cold from the real world, this is the chill and horror breathed by people upon the chest of a pure youth. And it is here that the need arises in him to break away from the beaten, ordinary, dusty path, which we see equally in all true artists. He is anything you like: a painter, a musician, a poet... only, for God’s sake, not a lawyer, not a mundane, everyday man. And this struggle between sympathy and necessity forces him to do ridiculous things. Having received a good position in Posen, do you know how he debuted? With caricatures of all his superiors; they responded to them with a denunciation, and Hoffmann had barely gotten used to Posen when he was dismissed. Some time later, we see him as an important government councilor in Warsaw. But he has not changed; he is still the same musician: he bustles, he toils, he collects money to establish a philharmonic hall; he succeeds, and Regierungs-Rath Government Councilor Hoffmann, in a greasy jacket, spends whole days on the rafters painting the ceiling of the hall; having finished, he appears as the conductor, beats time, directs, and composes so zealously that he does not notice at all that the whole of Europe is in blood and fire. Meanwhile, the war, seeing his inattention, decides to visit him in Warsaw itself; he would not have noticed it even then, but it was necessary to stop the concerts for a time. Hoffmann is in grief; but a few days later he writes to Hitzig that the concerts are continuing again, that he had a falling out with Napoleon’s conductor; "as for the political circumstances, they do not occupy me much;.. art, that is my patroness, my protector, my saint, to whom I am entirely devoted!"... Should one be surprised after that that Schlegel and Villemain understand literature differently, that one gave it an independent flight so as not to force it to share the boring peace of his homeland, while the other chained it to society in order to accelerate the development of literature by imparting to it the rapid motion of civic life? Schlegel and Villemain, these are Germany and France: Germany, living peacefully in studies and libraries, and France, crowding in coffee houses and the Palais-Royal; Germany, attentively re-reading its books, and France, devouring journals twice a day. Hoffmann, so occupied with concerts that he did not notice the approach of Napoleon, is a type of the past,

¹) Goethe, Faust, Part 1.