In the case of the man who is healthy in mind and body, this exploration goes on slowly, almost imperceptibly. One fine day the poor prisoner, looking up from his work, finds that the eye has disappeared from the peep-hole. Only now does he begin to breathe, to live. Whether his work be important or unimportant, divine or merely useful, whether he be a Michael Angelo or a cork-cutter, from that moment there is a feeling of balance and unity in his mind; he feels that he is an entire being. In the case of sickly, inactive natures, the eye is never removed from the peep-hole, and a long continuation of this condition leads the individual to the verge of madness. But it is to this very condition that the Romanticists cling. It is this which gives birth to the Romantic idea of the "Doppelgänger,"[2] an idea which finds its first expression in Jean Paul's _Leibgeber-Schoppe_ (in the meditation on Fichte's Ego), and is to be found in almost all Hoffmann's tales, reaching its climax in his chief work, _Die Elixire des Teufels_. It crops up in the writings of all the Romanticists; we have it in Kleist's _Amphitryon_, in Achim von Arnim's _Die beiden Waldemar_, in Chamisso's poem, _Erscheinung_, and Brentano treats it comically in _Die mehreren Wehmüller_. To Hoffmann the Ego is simply a disguise worn on the top of another disguise, and he amuses himself by peeling off these disguises one by one. He carries out what Roquairol only suggested. Theodor Hoffmann's life explains the peculiar form which Romantic self-duplication took in his case. He was born in Königsberg in 1776, the son of parents whose inharmonious union was soon dissolved. His mother belonged to a painfully well-regulated and conventional family; his father was as eccentric as he was clever, and had irregular habits which were a great affliction to his wife's relations. Theodor lost his mother early, and the pedantic severity with which his uncle brought him up only made the gifted boy's occasional wild outbursts wilder and madder. He found vent for his feelings in peculiar musical compositions and remarkably clever caricatures. He studied law as a profession, but at the same time devoted much attention to music. At an early age he fell in love with a young married woman. Feeling that the violence of this passion was undermining his reason, he cured himself of it by tearing himself away from his native town, at the age of twenty. Soon after this he received a government appointment in Posen. The wild dissipation which prevailed in Poland in those days carried him completely off his feet and materially altered his character. For caricaturing one of his superiors he was removed to Plozk, where he led a more regular life. [Illustration: HOFFMANN]