etre
into Germany. The best of these, _Salas y Gomez_, has the additional
advantage of real experience, for the material observation at the
basis of it is derived from his tour of circumnavigation. His poems in
this metre are often genre poems, pure prose in part, but frequently
of a drastic humor that ranks with that of the best of the old French
fabliaux. His realism is, however, never common, and, in such poems as
_The Old Washerwoman_, to quote Goethe's _Tasso_, "he often ennobles
what seems vulgar to us."

Chamisso is Romantic in his interest in translations, in early
reminiscences of Uhland's "castle-Romanticism," and in his poetry of
indefinite longing, but his admiration for Napoleon and his tendency
toward realism point the way which all Romanticism naturally took--the
way leading through Heine to Young Germany on the one hand and through
Tieck's novelettes to realistic prose on the other.

As a matter of fact, the work for which Chamisso is best known, a
work which has become international in popularity, _Peter Schlemihl_
(1813), is an early bit of such realistic prose. The tale of the
man who sells his shadow to the devil for the sake of the sack of
Fortunatus has become in Chamisso's hands a genuine folk-fairy-tale
in key-note and style. At the same time it is thoroughly Romantic
in subject-matter and treatment. The word Schlemihl is a Hebrew word
variously interpreted as "Lover of God," or as "awkward fellow." If
it mean the former, Schlemihl then becomes a Theophilus, that medieval
Faust who also made a compact with the devil; if the latter, one who
breaks his finger when sticking it into a custard pie; then Schlemihl
is Chamisso himself, "that dean of Schlemihls," feeling himself at a
loss in any environment. He may be the man without a country, he may
be the man who draws attention to himself by selling what seems of
little value to him, but which afterward proves indispensable for the
right conduct of life. The story in this way brings forward a bit
of popular ethics, or, rather, it examines an ethical note from the
popular point of view. Like Hoffmann, Chamisso takes his reader into
the midst of current life, but, unlike Hoffmann, his moods are not
the dissolving views which leave the reader in doubt as to whether
the whole is a phantasmagoria and a hallucination. _Schlemihl_ is
genuinely and consistently realistic. It is a story in the first
person and has a rigidly logical arrangement of episodes l