Weird Tales by E. T. W. Hoffman. New Translation from the German, with a Biographical Memoir, by J. T. Beally, B.A. In two volumes. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.
Hoffman, the German romancer, to most English readers who know of him, is a nomen et preteria nihil, yet in his own land he is a classic. His stories are mostly short tales or novelettes, for he appears to have lacked the sustained vigor and concentration for the longer novel, like our own Poe, to whom he has been sometimes likened in the character of his genius. Yet how marvellously unlike Poe’s are the stories in the volumes before us! The intense imaginativeness, logical coherence and lofty style which mark Poe are absent in Hoffman. Yet, on the other hand, the latter, who like his American analogue revels in topics weird and fantastic, if not horrible, relieves the sombre color of his pictures with flashes of homely tenderness and charming humor, of which Poe is totally vacant.
Hoffman, who was well born, though not of noble family, received an excellent education. He studied at Königsburg University, where he matriculated as a student of jurisprudence, and seems to have made enough proficiency in this branch of knowledge to have justified the various civil appointments which he from time to time received during his strange and stormy life, only to forfeit them by acts of mad folly or neglect. He was by turns actor, musician, painter, litterateur, civil magistrate and tramp. Gifted with brilliant and versatile talents, there was probably never a man more totally unbalanced and at the mercy of every wind of passion and caprice that blew. Had he possessed a self-directing purpose, a steady ideal to which he devoted himself, it is not improbable that his genius might have raised him to a leading place in German literature. Yet perhaps his talents and tastes were too versatile for any very great achievement, even under more favorable conditions. As matters stand he is known to the world by his short tales, in which he uses freely the machinery of fantasy and horror, though he never revolts the taste, even in his wildest moods. Yet some of his best stories are entirely free from this element of the strained and unnatural, and show that it was through no lack of native strength and robustness of mind, that he selected at other times the most abnormal and perverse developments of action and character as the warp of his literary textures. Hoffman’s stories are interesting from their ingenuity, a certain naïve simplicity combined with an audacious handling of impossible or improbable circumstances, and a charming under-current of pathos and humor, which bubbles up through the crust at the most unexpected turns. We should hardly regard these stories as a model for the modern writer, yet there is a quality about them which far more artistic stories might lack. It is singular to narrate that some of his most agreeable and objective stories, where he completely escapes from morbid imaginings, are those he wrote when dying by inches in great agony, for he, too, like Heine—a much greater and subtler genius—lay on a mattrass grave, though for months and not for years. The stories collected in the volumes under notice contain those which are recognized by critics as his best, and will repay perusal as being excellent representations of a school of fiction which is now at its ebb-tide, though how soon it will come again to the fore it is impossible to prophecy, as mode and vogue in literary taste go through the same eternal cycle, as do almost all other mundane things.
FOREIGN LITERARY NOTES.
Paul Ivanovich Ogorodnikof, who died last month at the age of fifty-eight, was destined for the army, but, being accused of participation in political disturbances, was confined in the fortress of Modlin. After his release he obtained employment in the Railway Administration, whereby he was enabled to amass a sum sufficient to cover the cost of a journey through Russia, Germany, France, England, and North America, of which he published an account. He was subsequently appointed correspondent of the Imperial Geographical Society in North-East Persia, and on his return home he devoted his exclusive attention to literature. His most interesting works, perhaps, are “Travels in Persia and her Caspian Provinces,” 1868, “Sketches in Persia,” 1868, and “The Land of the Sun,” 1881. But he was the author of various other works and numerous contributions to periodical literature, and in 1882 his “Diary of a Captive” was published in the Istorichesky Vyestnik.
The opening of the new college at Poona, India, which took place recently under the most favorable auspices, is noteworthy as marking the first important attempt of educated natives in the Bombay presidency to take the management of higher education into their own hands. The college has been appropriately named after Sir James Fergusson, who has always taken a great interest in the measures for its establishment, and during whose tenure of office as Governor of Bombay (now drawing to a close) such marked progress has been made in education in that presidency.
The first part of the second series of the Palæographical Society’s facsimiles, now ready for distribution to subscribers, contains two plates of Greek ostraka from Egypt, on which are written tax-gatherers’ receipts for imposts levied under the Roman dominion, A.D. 39-163; and specimens of the Curetonian palimpsest Homer of the sixth century; the Bodleian Greek Psalter of about A.D. 950; the Greek Gospels, Codex T, of the tenth century; and other Greek MSS. There are also plates from the ancient Latin Psalter of the fifth century and other early MSS. of Lord Ashburnham’s library; Pope Gregory’s “Moralia,” in Merovingian writing of the seventh century; the Berne Virgil, with Tironian glosses of the ninth century; the earliest Pipe Roll, A.D. 1130; English charters of the twelfth century; and drawings and illuminations in the Bodleian Cædmon, the Hyde Register, the Ashburnham Life of Christ, and the Medici Horæ lately purchased by the Italian Government.