It was a settled conviction with Hoffmann that when anything good befalls a man, an evil power is always lurking in the background to paralyse the action of the good power. As he expresses it: "The devil thrusts his tail into everything." He was haunted, says his biographer, Hitzig, by a fear of mysterious horrors, of "Doppelgänger" and spectral apparitions of every kind. He used to look anxiously round while writing about them; and if it was at night, he would often wake his wife and beg her to keep him company till he had finished. He imparted his own fear of ghosts to the characters he created; he drew them "as he himself was drawn in the great book of creation." It does not surprise us to learn that of his own works, he preferred those which contain the most gruesome pictures of madness or the weirdest caricatures--_Brambilla_, for instance. He relies for effect, in a manner which soon becomes mannerism, upon the sharp contrasts with which he ushers in his terrific or comical scenes. From the commonest, most prosaic every-day life we are suddenly transported into a perfectly distorted world, where miracles and juggling tricks of every kind so bewilder us that in the end no relation, no species of life, no personality, seems definite and certain. We are always in doubt as to whether we are dealing with a real person, with his spectre, with his essence in another form or other power, or with his fantastic "Doppelgänger." In one of the lighter tales of Hoffmann's last period, _Der Doppelgänger_, the two principal characters resemble each other so closely that one is constantly being taken for the other; the one is wounded instead of the other; the betrothed of the one cannot distinguish him from the other, &c., &c. All kinds of absurd mistakes are made possible, and the dread of "Doppelgängerei" is turned to good account. The common-sense explanation of the matter is insisted on (much as it is in Brentano's _Die mehreren Wehmüller_), simply because Hoffmann for once, by way of a change, fancied making some attempt at explanation. The explanation, as a matter of fact, explains nothing. All Hoffmann really cared for was the fantastically gruesome effect, just as all Brentano cared for was the fantastically comical one. _Der Doppelgänger_ possesses no artistic merit.