ABSTRACT
ZACHARIAS WERNER'S obsessive ’gospel' of love-by-renunciation—overlapping with the Liebestod-motif which runs through much romantic literature—reappears in a particularly remarkable form in the writings of E. T. A. Hoffmann. Superficially at least these writings, almost without exception, make a trivial impression, for they consist of fantastic stories and Märchen, two hardly less fantastic novels, decked out with most of the appurtenances of popular romantic fiction, and a great deal of critical or explanatory writing on music, which is eminently readable (like practically everything he wrote), illuminates the subject with intuitive perception and enthusiasm, but certainly does not go very deep, if it is judged by any intellectual standard. Nor does the Wernerlike doctrine of spiritual love really amount to much, as ideas go— it is the product of an eccentric dramatist’s idiosyncracy, and it appealed to his friend and countryman Hoffmann (who was also an eccentric personage) for roughly the same irrational and emotionally coloured reasons. Hoffmann had fallen in love with a young girl, Julia Marc, to whom he gave music lessons, and who evidently found herself in rather the same situation as the child Sophie von Kühn, when she was confronted by her exalted poetic lover Novalis : there was an unhappy outcome to Hoffmann’s love, as to his predecessor’s, for Julia was forced by her parents to marry another man, whom Hoffmann describes as a brutish creature of loose morals, who dragged her down towards his own level. As a result, Hoffmann conceived a spiritual and bizarre interpretation of love which has little to differentiate it in the first instance from Werner’s. To this initial doctrine of the non-fulfilment of true love in this mortal existence Hoffmann adds a supporting circumstance : the lover who must renounce achievement of love in this life is not, as he is in Werner’s lurid dramas, an Ancient Prussian or German prince (Das Kreuz an der Ostsee and Wanda) or a Hunnish king (Attila)—more or less exotic figures remotely existing in the dreamworld of romantic medievalism: for Hoffmann’s disappointed lovers are romantic artists like himself, forced to renounce, as he did, the earthly fulfilment of his love, but without the compensation of reunion in a higher existence which encourages Werner’s idealized knights, and even his barbarian warriors, to accept their lot with fortitude, perhaps complacency. For Hoffmann the romantic artist is something of a Joan of Arc-like figure, in a masculine version of Schiller’s characterization of that dedicated maiden, who cannot renounce her mission without incurring ruin: in Hoffmann’s usage this betrayal of the artist’s mission is sometimes fatal, not only for himself, but for the woman he loves—Die Jesuiterkirche in G.(1816), a short story, presents the most appalling development of this thesis. Hoffmann’s insistence on an inescapable artistic mission suggests that he inherited, among other things, from his romantic predecessors something of Wackenroder’s assumption of the divine inspiration of the artist, which brings with it its own dangers, since dedication to art makes the devotee unsuited for real life on this earth. In this respect, Hoffmann’s repeated self-portrait as the artist-hero of his stories—idealized and caricatured in almost equal proportions !—stands in the direct succession of Joseph Berglinger, Wackenroder’s literary spokesman in the Phantasien über die Kunst, who asserted : ‘Art is a seductive, forbidden fruit; whoever has once tasted its inmost, sweetest juice is irrevocably lost to the active world of everyday life.' 1
