curious editorial enterprise that tales of Hoffmann in 1829. The editor, Renduel, preceded the text with a preface by novelist Walter Scott, adored in France since the publication of Ivanhoe - translated by Defeaucompret - in 1820. Or hated Walter Scott Hoffman, the findings are unequivocal:
" It is impossible to submit such stories to criticism. These are not visions of a poetic mind and have not even this apparent association that the aberrations of dementia sometimes leave the ideas of a madman: it is the dreams of a weak head, prey to the fever, a moment that can excite our curiosity by their oddity, or our surprised by their originality, but never more than a very fleeting attention, and, indeed, the inspiration of Hoffmann like so many ideas generated by the immoderate use of opium, which we believe had longer need the aid of medicine as opinions of criticism . "(1)
It was hardly possible to make judgments more severe or more biased. And one can only wonder at the business of a publisher who, as a promotion, the author chose to present in a light so unfavorable. Is that the operation seemed very random, so Loève-Weimar, the translator, enjoyed a certain aura worldly, Hoffmann was virtually unknown to the public. While some reviews have mentioned his name during the previous year but his work remained unknown. Renduel had sought a name likely to avert the risks entailed by such a publication, a literary sort of bond. Loeve-Weimar yet managed to maneuver to curry favor with the press and the Tales should prevail in France a real popular success continues unabated during successive editions, being seen to Theophile Gauthier (2), in 1836, Hoffmann was now more popular in France than in Germany.
If the opposition between Walter Scott and Hoffmann presents an anecdotal interest, it falls more deeply in a controversy will arise where modernity. Recall that the Preface to Cromwell in 1827. Victor Hugo defends a conception of the drama, not content to go after conventional units defends new values: freedom of inspiration for the artist, mixing records, promotion the grotesque. (3)
Now that criticizes Walter Scott Hoffmann? His unbridled imagination, the incongruity of his intrigues, the quirkiness of his characters in a word, everything that Victor Hugo defends known as "grotesque." In other words, a new aesthetic in which the author of Ivanhoe could not agree because it already belongs to the past century. His demands of rationalism, reasonableness and moral education are not those of the younger Romantic generation that is about to overturn the rules in depth of Western art.
Placing himself under the aegis of Jacques Callot, Hoffmann implicitly demanded of the grotesque.
(1) Walter Scott's preface is reprinted in the Garnier Flammarion edition of Les Contes d'Hoffmann (1979), t. 1, p. 39-53.
(2) Theophile Gautier, "Les Contes d'Hoffmann," Chronique de Paris, August 14, 1836.
(3) The first collection of stories published by Hoffmann called Fantasies in the manner of Jacques Callot. Recall that Callot, engraver of the seventeenth century, embodies the grotesque as its predilection for the deformity by the nature of the subjects he tackles, popular figures, war atrocities, etc. ...
Ill. Walter J. Scott Graham