Hoffman died in Berlin. His career as a musical artist had been associated with the Prussian-Polish provinces, where he seems to have acquired habits of dissipation in brilliant but gay musical society.
Hoffman had exquisite refinement of taste, and sensitiveness to the beautiful in nature and art, but the exhilaration of the wine-cup was to him a fatal knowledge. It made him in the end a poor, despised, inferior man.
As he lost his self-mastery, he also seemed to lose his self-respect. He mingled with the depraved, and carried the consciousness of his inferiority into all his associations with better society.
“I once saw Hoffman,” says one, “in one of his night carouses. He was sitting in his glory at the head of the table, not stupidly drunk, but warmed with wine, which made him madly eloquent. There, in full tide of witty discourse, or, if silent, his hawk eye flashing beneath his matted hair, sat this unfortunate genius until the day began to dawn; then he found his way homeward.
“At such hours he used to write his wild, fantastic tales. To his excited fancy everything around him had a spectral look. The shadows of fevered thought stalked like ghosts through his soul.”
This stimulated life came to a speedy conclusion. He was struck with a most strange paralysis at the age of forty-six.
His disease first paralyzed his hands and feet, then his arms and legs, then his whole body, except his brain and vital organs.
In this condition it was remarked in his presence that death was not the worst of evils. He stared wildly and exclaimed,—
“Life, life, only life,—on any condition whatsoever!”
His whole hope was centred in the gay world which had already become to him as a picture of the past.