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All, too, had obviously happened to himself at some period of his roving career, though here and there he had disguised his own part in them by Hoffmann's device of throwing the action into the third person. Those told to me by word of mouth I could only feel were true, true for himself at least.
There is none of Poe's objectivity in Hoffmann, but he uses his subjectivity in a peculiarly Romantic fashion. It is his idea to raise the reader above the every-day point of view, to flee from this to a magic world where the unusual shall take the place of the real and where wonder shall rule. So there are in Hoffmann's stories a series of characters who are really doubles.
Doctor Ox was a man of medium size and height, aged : but we cannot state his age, any more than his nationality. Besides, it matters little; let it suffice that he was a strange personage, impetuous and hot-blooded, a regular oddity out of one of Hoffmann's volumes, and one who contrasted amusingly enough with the good people of Quiquendone.
It is like a dim reflection of a theatre in water, or in a dusty mirror; and reminds me of some of Hoffmann's wild Tales. It is a practical moral lesson, a commentary on the play, and makes the show complete."
You transport me to quaint old Nuremberg, and I see Hans Sachs making shoes, and Hans Folz shaving the burgomaster." "By the way," interrupted the Baron, "did you ever read Hoffmann's beautiful story of Master Martin, the Cooper of Nuremberg? I will read it to you this very night. It is the most delightful picture of that age, which you can conceive.
Fascinated, moreover, by the peculiar treatment of similar phenomena in Hoffmann's Tales, I sketched a novel in which musical mysticism, which I still loved so deeply, played an important part.
Hoffmann's whole learning seems to have been limited to the Bible, but this he knew from cover to cover. A diffusion of Luther's translation of the Bible had produced a revolution.
But I had to exercise great moderation here too, as every excitement threatened to bring on a return of erysipelas. A little party of us were at Karl Ritter's one evening, when I hit upon the idea of reading aloud Hoffmann's Der Goldene Topf.
Knowing that we had a difficulty in procuring fuel, he brought with him some bottles of rum, to 'warm' us with punch during the cold evenings; under these circumstances I read Hoffmann's Tales to him and my wife. At last I had news from Konigsberg, but it only opened my eyes to the fact that the gay young dog had not meant his promise seriously.
All I had ever read in Hoffmann's Tales of certain demoniacal intrigues, which until that moment had been obscure to me, now became really tangible facts, and I left Prague with an obviously unjust and exaggerated opinion of those things and those people, through whom I had suddenly been dragged into an unknown world of elementary passions.
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