Collected Works of A. I. Herzen, Volume 4

"When I was in that marvelous realm, I was tormented by both fear and pain! It was night; I feared hideous monsters that would plunge me to the bottom of the ocean, then lift me into the air. Suddenly, rays of light pierced the darkness; these rays were sounds, illuminating me with a kind of clarity filled with bliss. I woke up: a large, bright eye was turned toward the organ, and as long as it was turned toward it, tones flowed from it, glimmered, and merged into charming chords previously inaccessible to me. Waves of melodies surged; I plunged into this flood and was already drowning in it, when the eye turned toward me, and I remained on the surface of the waves. Darkness returned, and two giants appeared in shining armor: the Grund-Ton root tone and the quinta fifth! They rushed at me, carried me away. But the eye smiled: 'I know that your chest is filled with passion; a gentle, tender youth will come—the terza third; he will join the giants, you will hear his sweet voice, and my melodies will be yours.'"

Let us take Kreisler, the Kapellmeister Johann Kreisler, whom the German Prince Irenaeus called "Mr. Krösel"; this Mr. Krösel is the best work of Hoffmann, the most harmonious, filled with high poetry. Here, more than anywhere else, Hoffmann expressed everything he could, everything with which his soul was so full, regarding his favorite subject: music. Kreisler is a fiery artist, tormented from childhood by the inner fire of creation, living in sounds, breathing them, and at the same time restless, proud, casting contemptuous glances left and right. Hoffmann gave him his own character, or, rather, in him he described himself, and the rapid, sudden shifts of Kreisler from high sensations to sardonic laughter give him a kind of elusive physiognomy. And this Kreisler is placed between two beings of marvelous grace. One is a daughter of the North, a daughter of misty Germany, something languid, indefinite, mysterious, unfathomed—Hedwiga. The other breathes the south, Italy—the song of Rossini, a song fiery, bright, in love—Julia. And here, for shade, is Prince Irenaeus, the most kind-hearted 'God save the King.' But in Kreisler, the whole life of the artist is not yet exhausted. Hoffmann's dark imagination understood it more deeply. It descended into those forbidden bends of the passions that lead to crimes; and there is his "Iesuiten-Kirche" Jesuit Church. The artist lives only for the ideal, for his love for it; he is not at home on earth, not among his fellow men; for him, the whole earth is a huge dog kennel in which he suffocates. The artist, in the heat of dreaming, created an ideal, kept it, cherished it; his ideal is holy, pure, high, heavenly; and suddenly he found it in a woman, and this is a material woman, and she eats and drinks, in a word, a woman of bones and flesh, his earthly wife! The ideal was eclipsed, humiliated; the bursts of creativity vanished; the wife is to blame, and he is her murderer! But even here, in the crime itself, Hoffmann knew how to spill so much grace into his painter, and even here one can find the divine principle of the artist again, so that you cannot hate him. In many other tales, other elements of an artist's life are presented; we will not analyze them.

Two other elements of his tales, psychic phenomena and the miraculous, are for the most part intertwined. But here one must make a sharp distinction. Some tales breathe with something dark, deep, mysterious; others are the pranks of an unbridled imagination, written in the intoxication of bacchanalia. First, a few words about the former.

Idiosyncrasy peculiar mental temperament, convulsively wrapping the whole life of a person around some single thought, madness that overthrows the poles of mental life, magnetism, a magical power that mightily subordinates one person to the will of another, opens a huge field for Hoffmann's fiery imagination. But that is not all: there are people endowed with some unknown power that makes one tremble before them. Has it not happened to you to meet the gaze of a stranger, a suffocating and terrible gaze, from which you must turn away in horror, and which you remember to this day? Has it not happened that you met a whole person resembling that gaze, a man with a pale face, with dull eyes, with a convulsive smile, who repels you and at the same time attracts you? It is into these dark, inaccessible areas of psychic actions that Hoffmann was not afraid to descend, and he emerged—I will boldly say—triumphant. These are no longer the tense, drawn-out, painted tales of Jules Janin, children of the strange combination of 18th-century philosophy with German poetry. No! This is the wolf's glen of Der Freischütz The Marksman with all its horrors, with enchanted bullets, with a pale flickering light, with