The only contemporary German author besides Goethe who made any deep impression was E. Th. A. Hoffmann. Hoffmann, in fact, became to Frenchmen the German _par excellence_. Tieck was too vague, Novalis too mystical, to find the public in France which they did, for instance, in Denmark; but Hoffmann united to that wildly capricious fantasticality, which to Frenchmen was a perfectly new poetical element, the sharp decision of outline which appeals to them, and which reminded them of their compatriot Callot. His artistic courage, which dares to carry out capricious conceits to their extremest consequences, won their approbation. He dealt in strong colours and startling effects, and his work, with all its wildness, is as full of clear minute detail as a "Temptation of St. Anthony" by Breughel or Teniers; in contrast to Novalis, he appealed to Frenchmen by his Berlin rationality, which is so closely allied to French rationality; there was method in his madness. Thus it came about that he alone of all the German authors had followers, one may almost say disciples, in France. The influence of his tales is, as has already been observed, strongly felt in Charles Nodier's work; at a later period it is even more perceptible in Gérard de Nerval's, and it is unmistakable in Gautier's short stories. Highly original as this last-mentioned author is, and despite the fact that he hardly knew a word of German, he nevertheless at various periods of his life was under German influence. His youthful _Romans et Contes_ remind us of Hoffmann, and much in his _Émaux et Camées_ recalls Heinrich Heine. He had an intense admiration for Goethe's _West-Oestlicher Diwan_. What attracted him in Goethe was the artistic infallibility manifested by that great poet during the latter years of his life. [1] Stendhal: _Racine et Shakespeare_, p. 215. [2] _Racine et Shakespeare_, pp. 115, 117, 218 _note_. [3] _Cf_. Th. Ziesing: _Le Globe de 1824 à 1830_. [4] See Beyle: _Racine et Shakespeare_, 294; Balzac's own words in the preface to _La Comédie Humaine_; and the utterances of his alter ego, Daniel d'Arthez, in _Les Illusions perdues_. VI RETROSPECT--INDIGENOUS SOURCES But the renascence of literature in France was not due chiefly to foreign influences. It was upon the soil of their native country that the new men built. The work accomplished by a great literary school such as the Romantic School in France may be compared to the building of a town, only that the town of literature is invariably built upon land which is protected merely by slight and leaky embankments from the waters of forgetfulness. Water at the foundations is soon discovered; it rises slowly but steadily; at last the lower buildings disappear, and only the loftiest monuments remain towering, eternally visible, above the level of the Lethean stream.