A German critic of considerable authority speaks of “Peter Schlemihl” as “a faultless work of art, and one of deep import.” It is not necessary to concur in this estimate nor to imagine, as some do, that the shadowless man was a symbol of the author, “a wanderer without a country,” in order to give the book a reasonably high place in literature. No doubt there are autobiographical features in the story, but Chamisso’s own account of its simple genesis is evidently the true one. “I had lost,” he said, “upon a journey, my hat, portmanteau, gloves, pocket-handkerchief, and my entire travelling outfit. Fouqué asked me if I had not also lost my shadow, and we pictured this misfortune to ourselves.” Something out of La Fontaine furnished another incident, and the book was written largely to amuse the children of the author’s friend Hilzig. It is a sort of fairy story dealing largely with the supernatural.
At the garden of a rich gentleman to whom he has brought a letter of introduction, Peter Schlemihl meets a quiet man dressed in gray, who, when anything is desired by the guests, at once takes it out of his pocket. A piece of court plaster, a telescope, a Turkish carpet, a tent, and finally a horse saddled and bridled, are successively producedwithout anyone showing surprise at these remarkable proceedings or even seeming to know who the stranger is. When Schlemihl retires from the company the gray man follows him and offers him the inexhaustible purse of Fortunatus in exchange for his shadow. Schlemihl, poor man, thinking it a small thing to part with at such a price, sells this humble attendant to the devil, and the rest of the book sets forth the calamities that follow—the pity of the old women, the outcry of the children, the contempt of the men, especially the stout ones who have broad shadows of their own. Schlemihl tries to keep in the shade, shuts himself up in his room with his gold, proposes to have a shadow painted, sends his faithful servant Bendel to get his own back from the gray man, but all in vain. The stranger promises, however, to return “in a year and a day.”
All the splendor procured by Schlemihl’s wealth is as nothing by the side of the evil fate entailed by the loss of his shadow. He is especially unfortunate in love. At first Fanny smiles upon his suit, but falls senseless when the moon rises and casts only a single shadow as the two sit side by side. Then, when he flees to another country, where the people take him for a king and he wins sweet Mina’s heart, his secret is betrayed by Rascal, one of his own hirelings, who robs him at once both of his money and his intended bride.
At the end of the year and the day the gray man appears and offers him back his shadow if he will only subscribe a little obligation to surrender tothe bearer his soul after its separation from his body. The argument is cogent. “What sort of a thing is your soul? Have you ever seen it, and what do you think you can do with it after you are dead?” But this time the voice of the tempter is unavailing, for although at first Peter is on the point of yielding when tortured by the sight of his weeping Mina about to be consigned to the arms of the hated Rascal, yet a friendly unconsciousness overcomes him and the contract is not signed.
The poor unfortunate again rides forth into the world, followed by the man in gray, until at last Schlemihl in despair flings away the purse, whereupon his evil spirit departs, leaving him free and light-hearted, although poor as well as shadowless and alone in the world.
He now avoids human society, and having become possessed of a pair of seven-league boots he is astonished to find himself striding over immense tracts of territory in an incredibly short space of time. Now he first clearly sees his appointed destiny. Shut out from the society of his fellows, nature is to be his compensation. The earth is given to him as a rich garden, and science is to be the purpose of his life. He naturally has facilities for investigation possessed by no one else. He strides through all parts of both continents, passing across Behring Straits from Asia to America, but he deplores the fact that New Holland and other islands of the Pacific are still inaccessible to him, and he gazes from the utmost point of land which his seven-league boots will permithim to reach, to the unattainable regions beyond the sea, and deems himself as badly off as if he were still behind the bars of a prison, oppressed as he is with the terrible consciousness that his great work on natural history, embracing only the flora and fauna of the two continents, must still remain a fragment.
He chooses for his hermitage a cave in the Thebais, and when we leave him he is still engaged in the preparation of his great work.
There is an inexhaustible fund of humor in the story. The various excuses given by Schlemihl for the loss of his shadow are certainly grotesque. One was that when he was travelling in Russia it froze so hard that the shadow stuck to the ground; another that a rough man walked so rudely into the shadow that he tore a hole in it and it was sent out to be mended. Another excuse was that it disappeared during a long sickness, with the hair and nails of the hero, and while hair and nails had been restored, the shadow had never come back.
“Peter Schlemihl” is written in a charming style. The vocabulary and the diction are extremely simple. This is perhaps due to the fact that the book was intended for a child’s story, but still more, I think, to the fact that Chamisso being by birth a Frenchman, his diction has something in it of the clear and luminous character of French prose.