“Rath Krespel” first appeared as an untitled story in the Frauentaschenbuch für das Jahr 1818, where it was prefaced by a long letter of dedication to Fouqué. It was revised a little when it was included in Die Serapionsbrüder.
One source of the story was Johann Bernhard Crespel (1747–1815), an eccentric German official who was a friend of the Goethe family and is mentioned in a letter from Goethe’s mother to the poet. Crespel apparently designed his own clothing to fit his moods, and at one time designed and built a house in the same way as Hoffmann’s Rath Krespel. How Hoffmann learned about Crespel is not known, although it has been speculated by H. W. Hewett-Thayer in his excellent Hoffmann., Author of the Tales that Hoffmann may have heard of him through Brentano. This, however, is only part of the personality of Krespel. It is generally conceded that an element of Hoffmann’s own personality has been added to that of the historical Crespel. Hoffmann’s Krespel is not really mad, but is very much like Hoffmann himself. He is really a man without a skin—as, indeed, Hoffmann describes him. Krespel’s sensitivity is so great that daily life would be impossible for him if he could not take refuge in semi-madness to abreact his unconscious processes. Ultimately, he is really horribly sane.
Hoffmann’s musical life is also reflected in this story, particularly in the clash of the Italian and German musical cultures of the day. Such a clash of musics is often described in Hoffmann’s work. “The Interrupted Cadence” (“Die Fermate”), for example, describes a tempestuous affair between an Italian soprano and a German composer, who discover that there is no real possibility of understanding between them. Hoffmann himself shared such a tension between his admiration for the German tradition of Bach and Mozart on one hand, and his delight in Italian opera. It may be significant to Hoffmann’s point of view that in “Rath Krespel” the ideal combination of power and beauty, Antonia, cannot survive; she bears within herself germs of destruction.
“Rath Krespel” is one of the most tragic of Hoffmann’s stories, since it involves not only death, but the destruction of an art and the misery of sane insanity. Equally sinister is the equation of Antonia and the strange violin, and the life-bond between them. It would be curious to know if the name Antonia had any special significance for Hoffmann, what with Antonio Stradivari.
“Tobias Martin, Master Cooper and His Men” (“Meister Martin der Küfner und seine Gesellen”) first appeared in the Taschenbuch zum geselligen Vergnügen auf das Jahr 1819, and was reprinted with some alterations in the second volume of Die Serapions-brüder (1819). Like another of Hoffmann’s stories, “Doge und Dogaressa,” it is essentially a program piece written to explain a painting by a now nearly forgotten Romantic artist, Karl Wilhelm Kolbe. “Tobias Martin” was suggested by a very large oil entitled “Die Böttcherwerkstatt,” which shows a group of coopers in antique costume working in an open shed. Hoffmann’s story creates the background against which this picture situation arose, and also carries the situation through to a resolution. Hoffmann thereby transmuted an academic painting into one of the most entertaining stories in early 19th-century German literature.
The source for Hoffmann’s. information about medieval Nuremberg and the meistersingers and early guilds was Johann Christoph Wagenseil’s De sacri romani imperii libera civitate Noribergensi Commentatio, or Chronicle of Nuremberg, which later became more famous as the source for Wagner’s Die Meistersinger. This same book also served as the source for Hoffmann’s well-known story about a homicidal maniac motivated by aesthetic impulses, “Das Fräulein von Scuderi,” which has been variously translated under the titles “Mademoiselle de Scuderi,” “Cardillac the Jeweller,” “Cardillac,” and so forth.
In “Tobias Martin, Master Cooper,” as in most of his historical nouvelles, Hoffmann used a straight-line mode of narration which contrasts greatly with the involved avant-garde development of his fantasies, what with their double narratives, symbolic cores and fragmentations of personality. Yet even here there are unusual features. Another author might have told the story more strongly from the point of view of Friedrich, and might have pushed Meister Martin, the title figure, more into the background. Another artist might have treated Martin’s “growth” and his interpretation of the mysterious prophecy a little less ambiguously. At times it almost seems as if the story cannot be permitted to end until all of the major characters have learned that they must be honest with themselves.
“Meister Martin” has long been a favorite, and around the turn of the present century it was usually regarded as Hoffmann’s best story. It has since fallen in esteem, while the fantasies have risen. To me it seems unfortunate that Hoffmann confined himself to writing “program fiction” simply to elucidate a mediocre painting. If the story had been independently written, it might be stronger in central situation and less sentimental. Nevertheless, the basic personalities of the story emerge with charm and clarity, and Hoffmann evokes the personality of Nuremberg so attractively that the story has served as the suggestion for much other work, chief of which is Richard Wagner’s Die Meistersinger.
“The Mines of Falun” (“Die Bergwerke zu Falun”) first appeared in 1819 in Die Serapionsbrüder. In a critical afterword to the story one of Hoffmann’s spokesmen tells where the idea came from: an anecdote in G. H. Schubert’s Ansichten von der Nachtseite der Naturwissenschaften, one of the most influential books of the day. According to Schubert, when miners opened a new tunnel in the great Swedish mine complex at Falun, they found the perfectly preserved body of a man dressed in archaic garments. Hoffmann was one of many writers who seized upon this incident as the kernel for a story, and the basic idea became as important for the early 19th century as the motive of the Frozen Pirate was at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries.
Hoffmann’s story is written against a background that is strikingly romantic in its concepts and associations. Starting with Novalis (Count Friedrich von Hardenberg), prophet of German Romanticism, the miner as such took on a peculiar significance in German literature. He was not considered to be an exploited toiler or a laborer in a particularly dirty and dangerous mode of work. He became a quasisupernatural being who knew the intimate secrets of nature, of creation, and of the fructifying force that was believed to create the minerals. His knowledge passed beyond that of ordinary men, and he had a touch of the divine or demonic about him. Novalis in his Heinrich von Ofterdingen says of miners and mining, “Possessors of a much-envied happiness in learning nature’s hidden mysteries, and communing in solitude with the rocks, her mighty sons. . . . It is enough for the miner to know the hiding places of the metallic powers and to bring them forth to light; but their brilliance does not raise thoughts of covetousness in his pure heart. Untouched by this dangerous madness, he delights more in their marvellous formations, the strangeness of their origin, and the nooks in which they are hidden. . . . His business cuts him off from the usual life of man, and prevents his sinking into dull indifference as to the deep supernatural tie which binds man to heaven. He keeps his native simplicity, and sees in all around its inherent beauty and marvel. . . . In these obscure depths there grows the deepest faith in his heavenly Father, whose hand guides and preserves him in countless dangers. . . . He must have been a godlike man who first taught the noble craft of mining, and traced in the rocks so striking an image of life.” Novalis’s comments are not simply a literary device; there are also elements here of the ancient magic associated with metals and minerals (as Mircea Eliade has discussed them in his Forge and the Crucible) which persisted strongly up-through the Renaissance.
For Hoffmann,the miner owes allegiance to a supernatural power personified as the Metal Queen. The heart of the story is Elis’s rejection of the metal revelation. Once again the artist (as in many other stories by Hoffmann) must choose between loss of his supernatural aims and the death of the domestic man. The agent of Elis’s death, the demonic Torbern, is really a creature out of Germanic literary folklore. Many of the Numbernip (Rübezahl) stories by Fouqué, for example, dis
cuss folkloristic demons as erratically malevolent beings who are associated with the chthonic powers and serve both to lead and mislead man.
“Signor Formica,” or “Salvator Rosa,” first appeared in late 1819 in the Taschenbuch zum geselligen Vergnügen auf das Jahr 1820, and was reprinted with minor changes in the fourth volume of Die Serapionsbrüder. It was subtitled a “novella,” and probably was written with the work of the Italian Renaissance novelists in mind. One of the critics in Die Serapionsbrüder, however, criticized it as resembling Boccaccio more in the beatings its characters received than in much else. Another facet of Hoffmann defended the story mildly by pointing out that both Cervantes and Boccaccio did not hesitate to propel their stories by physical violence.
For “Signor Formica,” which in many ways is one of Hoffmann’s most interesting stories, Hoffmann drew upon the life of the great 17th-century Italian painter Salvator Rosa. At the time that Hoffmann wrote, Rosa stood high critically. The early Romantic revival of the late 18th century found him congenial. His well-known terribilità; his devastating energy; his highly felt painting technique and subject matter, in which the forces of nature seemed to be the real subjects, with but a few scattered humans as symbolic punctuation; and his general evocation of untamable, dynamic violence—all aroused enthusiasm. Rosa’s life was reasonably well known in Hoffmann’s day, and Hoffmann made a thorough study of French, Italian, and German sources. To get local color and to create the atmosphere of Italy, Hoffmann read extensively in travel accounts, particularly the reminiscences of Karl Philipp Moritz, an 18th-century German traveller. Hoffmann also collected Italian prints and maps, which he hung on the walls of his rooms, for inspiration, just as his character Peregrinus Tyss in Meister Floh does for China. Hoffmann, of course, was saturated in Italian musical life, and for this needed no special sources.
Basically “Signor Formica” is accurate—with occasional liberties—although the personality of Antonio Scacciati and the incidents of his courtship are fictitious. Salvator Rosa did leave Naples a few steps ahead of the police because of his share in Masaniello’s insurrection; he did act as a member of a commedia dell ’ arte group in Rome; and he did later found an accademia in Florence. Like Hoffmann himself the historical Rosa was a virtuoso in many media: painting, literature, music, and the stage. Today, however, he is a nearly forgotten member of a branch of Baroque painting.
One of the most curious aspects of “Signor Formica” lies in its use of the double or doppelgänger. Originally, the doppelgänger was an element of Germanic folklore. It amounted to seeing one’s own ghost, an exact double of oneself: this meeting was usually an omen of death. (In origin this idea would seem to go back to the primitive idea of multiple souls and soul-loss as a cause of death.) Around the end of the 18th century the doppelgänger became an important element in German fiction. The sinister elements were often suppressed and in their place came an intellectual interest in seeing oneself. The most curious incident involving a doppelganger came from the life of Goethe: the great poet believed that on several occasions he had seen his own doppelgänger.
For Hoffmann the doppelgänger had a special significance. It was not simply a mysterious, supernatural double; instead it was associated with the strange phenomena of the mind, with personality fragments, with multiple personalities (a phenomenon which interested early 19th-century psychologists) and with emergence of an unconscious mind. In story technique this meant that a personality complex could assume spontaneous, autonomous life and become a character itself. From a converse point of view, two persons who were physically nearly identical might fuse, to form a single personality, or to create an impermanent, rotating personality which shifts from pole to pole of identity. This is the case in The Devil’s Elixir where two persons in a doppelgänger relationship to one another contaminate each other. At times this concept of the doppelgänger (as in Jean Paul’s Doppelgänger and Goethe’s Wahlverwandschaft) can become attenuated enough to drop the idea of likeness or identity, and to indicate inner relationships, like “elective affinities” in the chemistry of the day. This results in a horizontal concept of kinship as opposed to a vertical one. The strongest bonds of relationship are between persons who are similar rather than those of vertical blood descent. Persons in a doppelganger relationship are sympathetic (in the derivational sense of the word) to one another’s experiences. A later stage of this idea, familiar to us from Dumas’ novel, is the motive of the “Corsican brothers”—identical twins, perhaps separated Siamese twins, who both feel pain if one is injured, no matter how far apart they may be.
In “Salvator Rosa” Hoffmann makes use of the doppelgänger motive in a novel way. The idea is now completely secularized and stripped of its supernatural associations, and-as stage imposture it serves to resolve the story. The confrontation of a lecherous old miser with his double twice dissolves the frame of difficulties that beset Antonio and Salvator Rosa.
All in all, Hoffmann’s story is successful in evoking the atmosphere of baroque Italy, with its violence, egotism, saturation in the pictorial arts, and devotion to music. It is probably not an exaggeration to say that in this respect “Salvator Rosa” is the most successful historical novel that had yet appeared in Europe. Where Hoffmann may have lagged somewhat in literary technique (as compared with, say, Goethe), he was ahead in the intuitive apprehension of alien times and places which was so characteristic of the German Romantics from Herder on. As a result, his picture of 17th-century Italy carries conviction. In other respects, however, the novel suffers a little from Gothic survivals. The concept of the hero as one “der nie als Held des Stückes, sondern nur als Vermittler” forces Antonio Scacciati to have a passive role, while Salvator Rosa, the demonic activist, initiates and creates. The point would seem to be that the artist can succeed in his work and his love-life only with the assistance of a daimon. To a modern reader, this peculiar plot device may make the story seem less a true nouvelle than a narrative, but the fact that “Salvator Rosa” is written to an unfamiliar aesthetic need not impair our pleasure in reading it.
“The King’s Betrothed” (“Die Königsbraut”) was written especially for the last volume of Die Serapionsbrüder (1821). Each volume of the collection ends with a fantastic story, and “The King’s Betrothed” concludes Volume IV and the set on a note of fantasy. It is very heavily ironic in tone, and it satirizes several contemporary phenomena: bad poets, particularly the sickly sentimental poets of a school parallel to the English Della Cruscans; ineffectual, ivory-tower mystical philosophers and philosophy; and stories describing erotic relationships between mortals and supernatural beings. Of such stories Fouqué’s Undine is the most famous.
The subject matter of “The King’s Betrothed” has been taken from Renaissance and Enlightenment books on occultism and magic, an area in which Hoffmann was well-read. The doctrine of Paracelsus and others in this tradition was that the natural forces were the product of ideal substances, which were personified as supernatural beings, usually called elementals because of their relationship to the Aristotelian elements: salamanders as the spirits or essence of fire; undines for water; sylphs for the air; and gnomes for the earth. Slightly variant classifications may be found in the several sources. Hoffmann found the precise origins of his system and many of the ludicrous historical details about human-elemental relationships in one of the early books associated with the Renaissance Rosicrucian movement, Le Comte de Gabalis, an eccentric novel by the Abbé Montfaucon de Villars. Yet beyond this occult background is Hoffmann’s probable intention of showing a personality (Aennchen) who has submerged herself in the vegetative life so deeply that it emerges separately and tries to swallow her.
In this edition all ten stories have been edited slightly: a few errors and mistranslations have been corrected and a few omissions rectified. I have also tried to restore something of the briskness and modernity that is to be found in Hoffmann’s German text. It is somewhat unfortunate that most of Hoffmann’s translators were
Victorians, who unconsciously equated the archaic and the fantastic. Whereas Hoffmann’s German is usually simple, modern in vocabulary and contemporary in feeling, his translators all too often have rendered him into an English that is complex, curious, and sometimes tedious. This may seem to be an academic point, but this recasting of Hoffmann by his translators has resulted in the loss of three of his greatest gifts: nervous energy, hard clarity of expression, and narrative flow. In German Hoffmann is one of the most rapid authors; in English, he often seems to be slow.
I have tried to correct this situation somewhat by removing the “thees” and “thous” and other archaisms that tend to retard the story flow, and by simplifying some of the involved constructions, which are often more intricate than the German itself. All this, of course, involves another problem—the degree to which one can edit another man’s work and still leave it his.
Thomas Carlyle, whose version of “Der goldne Topf” is included, has been a special problem. In many ways his translation is a work of genius, and yet it is also at times a bad translation. His Scottish dialect and linguistic willfulness are not only disturbing in themselves, but seem to have corrupted many of the later translators. The problem here was to remove as much of the Scottishness and eccentricity as damaged Hoffmann, and yet not destroy Carlyle. Perhaps this cannot be done.
This present volume, it would seem to me, is best considered an interim edition, prepared to satisfy a need until something better emerges. Hoffmann deserves to be retranslated into modern English in a manner that retains his strengths.
The Best Tales of Hoffmann Page 4
