Collected Works of A. I. Herzen, Volume 4

took a false direction, lost themselves in the boring details of all the vulgarities of the private life of ordinary people, and, being even more vulgar than life itself, fell into cloying, syrupy sentimentality: these are Lafontaine, Iffland, Kotzebue. They are read now by die Stubenmädchen housemaids on Saturdays, gathering from them a whole arsenal of tenderness for Sunday. But this deviation of the novel was abundantly rewarded by the charming works of the mysterious Jean Paul, the naive Novalis, the Gothic Tieck. Goethe, this Zeus of art, the poet Buonarroti, the Napoleon of literature, threw his "Werther" to Germany, a song pure, high, burning, a song of love, beginning with the quietest adagio slow tempo and ending with a frenzied cry of death, tearing the soul—addio! goodbye! After "Werther," Goethe sings another marvelous song, a song of youth, in which everything breathes with the fresh breath of a youth, where all objects are seen through the prism of youth—these torn scenes, rhapsodies without external connection, closely linked by a common life and poetry. And what creations fill his "Wilhelm Meister!" Mignon, a bayadere, barely able to speak, broken for buffoonery, dreaming of a land of lemon trees, of oranges, of its bright sky, of its warm breath—Mignon, pure, immaculate as a dove; and, on the other hand, the voluptuous, fiery Philine, luxurious as the land of the south, burning, frenzied as a youthful bacchanalia, Philine, hating the daylight and living fully in the secret, undefined shimmering of a lamp, burning in the arms of his; and right there, the majestic bas-relief of the old man deprived of sight, the harper, for whom bread was bitter and whose tears streamed in the silence of the night!

III.

Die Kunst ist meine Beschützerin, meine Heilige. Art is my protectress, my saint. Hoffmann’s letter to Hitzig, 1812.

At the beginning of the current century, an original writer appeared in German literature, Theodor-Amadeus Hoffmann: subdued by an unbridled fantasy, with a soul strong and deep, an artist in the full meaning of the word, he traced with a bold pen some kind of shadows, some kind of ghosts—sometimes terrible, sometimes comical, but always elegant; and it is these undefined, sketched shadows that are his novellas. The ordinary, boring order of things pressed Hoffmann too much; he neglected the wretched plastic plausibility...