In all of these plays, in so
far as they are good, the effect is produced by the recognition
scenes which hold the reader rapt to the end. But the weak and vulgar
imitations of the category outnumbered the powerful plays in the
_genre_, and the well-merited death-blow was given them by Platen's
_The Fateful Fork_ (1826).
E.T.A. Hoffmann (1776-1822) was a thoroughly Romantic person. Like
his fellow-Koenigsberger, Werner, he went through a period of wildest
dissipation, and all his life was easily influenced by alcohol. He was
a painter, a writer, and a musician. His ability in the pictorial arts
was mainly in caricature and his career as a composer is typically
Romantic; though he never but once completed a composition, that he
started, he was thoroughly at home in the theory of the art. Like all
Romanticists, Hoffmann was interested in and tried all phases of life
and refused to recognize the boundaries between the various parts
of existence, between the arts, and between reality and unreality.
Hoffmann, with all his North German power of reasoning and his zeal
and conscientiousness in public office, was emphatically _that_
Romanticist associated with the night-sides of literature and life.
There is something uncanny both in the man and his writings. His
power of putting the scene of his most unreal stories in the midst of
well-known places, his ability to shift the reader from the real
to the unreal and _vice versa_, make some of his stories seem like
phantasmagorias.
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