heir works were beautiful, as the
potter sees that his pot is round and smooth, and the smith that his
blade is bright and sharp. For the rest they were terribly prosaic,
terribly given up to the mechanical interests of their art and the
material interests of their lives, as you may see them in Vasari, in
the lives of Handel, of Bach, of Haydn, of Mozart, of the last of true,
unpoetic musicians, Rossini, and as you would doubtless see the unknown
sculptors of antiquity if you could see them at all.

But the time came when the world, which had lived off prose most
heartily ever since the Middle Ages, grew sick of such coarse mental
food, and longed for unsubstantial poetic ambrosia; the fact is, it was
morally sick, and took its strong intellectual food in disgust, and
fancied and yearned for impossible things, as sick men do. And in its
loathing for the common, the simple, the healthy, the world took to
eating the intellectual opium of romanticism; it enjoyed and was plunged
for awhile in ineffable delights, such as only weakness can feel and
poison afford; the universe seemed to expand, the imagination to grow
colossal, the feelings to become supernaturally subtle; all limits were
removed, all impossibilities became possibilities; the fancy roamed over
endless and ever varying tracts, and soared up into the clouds of the
unintelligible, and dived into the bottomless abyss of chaos: all things
quivered with a strange new life, with a life in other lives, with an
unceasing, ever changing life; everything was not only itself but
something else: all was greater, higher, deeper, brighter, darker,
sweeter, bitterer, more ineffable than itself; it was a paradise
of Mahomet, of Buddha, of Dante; it was enjoyment keen, subtle,
intoxicating, which made the fancy swim, the senses ache, and the
soul faint. Then came the reaction, the inevitable after-effect of the
drug--depression, langour, palsy, convulsion.

About seventy years ago a great humourist, who frittered away a quaint
and fantastic genius in etching grimacing caricatures, and scribbling
gaunt ghost stories, the once popular, now almost forgotten, Hoffmann,
looked on at this crisis in musical history, at this first intoxication
of romanticism; sympathised with its poetry, its ludicrousness, and
its sadness; embodied them all in one grotesque, pathetic figure,
and for the first and last time in his life produced a masterpiece.
The masterpiece is his poor, half-mad music