t. 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.

In all of Hoffmann's stories there is some unpleasant, bizarre
character; this is the author's satire on his own strange personality.
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. To the uninitiated they seem
every-day creatures; to those who know, they are fairies or beings
from the supernatural world. Such characters are found at their best
in _The Golden Pot_.

Hoffmann has influenced both French and English literatures more than
any other Romantic poet. Hawthorne and Poe read him, and he was felt
by the French to be one of the first Germans whom they understood. It
was not merely that his clear reason appealed to the French, but that
they saw in him one endowed as with a sixth sense. He has a fineness
of observation, especially for the ridiculous sides of humanity,
together with a tenderness of spirit, that was new in German
literature as such men as Sainte-Beuve and Gautier saw it. The soul
at war with itself, uncovering its most secret thoughts, the _"malheur
d'etre poete,"_ coupled with wit, taste, gaiety, and the comedy
spirit--all these the French found in Hoffmann as in no other German.
Poe was also influenced by Hoffmann, but Poe's whole world is the
supernatural, and where Hoffmann slips with fantastic but logical
changes from the real to the unreal, Poe's metempsychosis is the real
in his world and he has a deeper insight into the world of terror. The
difference between Hawthorne and Hoffmann