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had become grave and silent. "I must admit," he said, "that in this little tale or 'prank'--for I don't know what else to call it--of Lothair's there predominates an attempt, often more or less successful, at a certain sort of amusing _naivete_, very appropriate to the character of the German Devil. Also, that when he talks about the Devil's jumping over the streets hand in hand with respectable townfolk and of the 'chestnut brown schismatic,' who might turn out a quaint and ugly _savant_, though never a nice, natty, spick-and-span Member of Council, we see the curvets and the caprioles of the same little Pegasus which was bestridden by the author of 'Nutcracker.' Still, I think that he ought to have got on the back of a horse of a different colour; and, indeed, I cannot say what the reason exactly is why the pleasantly comic impression which the earlier part of the story produces vanishes away into nothingness; whilst, out of this nothingness, there ultimately develops a certain something which becomes most uncanny and unpleasant; and the concluding words, which are intended to do away with this feeling, do not succeed in doing away with it." "Oh, thou most sapient of all critics," Lothair cried, "who dost such high honour to this most insignificant thing of all the insignificant things which I have ever written down as to dissect it carefully with magnifying glasses on nose, let me tell you that it served me as an anatomical study long ago. Did I not style it a mere product of a mood of caprice? Have I not anathematized it myself? However, I am glad that I read it to you, because it gives me an opportunity of speaking my mind concerning tales of this kind. And I am sure that my Serapion Brethren will agree with me. In the first place, Ottmar, I should like to trace out for you the germ of that unpleasant--or, better, 'uncanny'--feeling which you were conscious of when you were at first beginning to see what you have called the 'amusing _naivete_' of it. Whatever grounds the good old Hafftitz may have had for telling us that the Devil passed a certain time leading the life of a townsman of Berlin, this remains for us a wholly 'fanciful' or 'fantastic' incident. And the quality of the 'supernatural'--the 'spookishness' (to use an expression now not unfamiliar)--which is a leading characteristic of that tremendous 'principle of negation'--that 'spirit which eternally denies and destroys'--is, by reason of the (in a man
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