Of ancient noble Franconian stock, he felt himself a
foreigner in Bavaria which had acquired Franconia in the Napoleonic
period. In his early life in the military academy at Munich he was
never thoroughly at home, for his was not a military spirit and he was
unable to follow his literary tastes. When finally he was enabled to
study at Wuerzburg and Erlangen, even the friendship of Schelling could
not compensate for the late beginning of a university career which was
filled with the study of modern European and Oriental languages but
which had the bitterest personal disappointments. Even in Italy, the
land of every German poet's dreams, Platen never felt himself at
home, and the pictures of him from his Italian life are of a tragic,
lonesome figure. The discord between body and soul, that homelessness
in one's own physical body which characterized Hoffmann and made him
seem diabolical to so many, is also to be noted in Platen. Carried
over to the moral world, it accounts for his ardent cultivation of
friendship rather than love, and frees him from the bitter accusations
of Heine, whose attack in _The Baths of Lucca_ is one of the most
scurrilous and venomous pasquils in all literary history. Finally, in
the esthetic world, Platen seems largely un-German. His esthetics were
of the Classical and Renaissance times; in an age of the breaking
down of conventions and of literary revolutions, Platen held himself
rigidly aristocratic; he clung to a canon of beauty in an age which
was giving birth to realism.
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