160.VARNHAGEN TO HUMBOLDT.
Berlin,July 8th, 1854.
Berlin,July 8th, 1854.
Berlin,July 8th, 1854.
Berlin,July 8th, 1854.
With emotions of gratitude I received the dear letter of your Excellency. Yet a sign of life, indeed, a sign of the most vigorous life! Whenever the question could arise how you felt and thought in this gloomy time, such a sheet would be the most decided answer, the most brilliant testimony, to a sentiment and activity which always kept on in the same direction, and never proved false. The letter from London—the epithet “unkempt” is singularly happy. I send back dutifully, as directed; how I should have liked to incorporate it with my collections! It is a remarkable sign of the present situation; many expressions in it strikingly significant. Had the writer but expressed himself thus before his last personal experience! The scientific renown which you believe in danger from the threatening deluge of writings seems to me to have stood from the first upon unsafe ground, upheld by external props, with which it must fall inevitably. Perhaps a political career will be open to him again, but certainly not through literary aid, for which, in part, this sudden literary taste seemsintended. Silent rest would be far more useful. But this can hardly be expected in the place selected, where Catholic hatred is already alive, and nourishes and strengthens that political rancor which will continue in vigor, fed with fuel from here.
The late Prince Wittgenstein once congratulated me that I had not to sit in the Council of State, and that was the old Council, of which your Excellency also was a member! How much more must I congratulate you on your escape from the new one, of which Stahl and Ranke are members! To the latter, no one will dispute the part of the clown; to the first, every one will accord that of the sophist.
The words of Gneisenau, which Pertz alludes to in Stein’s Leben (v. 262), are so entirely inapplicable to William von Humboldt that one would be tempted to interpret the H. differently, if an acceptable conjecture could be found. I have myself, indeed, heard from Gneisenau’s lips expressions of dissatisfaction, but never such extravagant ones, which might be contradicted so easily and perfectly. What Gneisenau blamed chiefly in your brother was that he never tried, by the respect which he commanded and by the superiority of his mind, to unite all those of equal sentiment into a communion, by which much might have been undertaken and effected. But this reproach, if it be one, Gneisenau himself deserved as well, and received from his adherents!The book of Pertz is full of aspersions and incongruities, which, indeed, in most cases originate in Stein himself, but are confirmed by Pertz in blind partiality; he, while communicating everything, even in many cases things which do not belong to the subject, leaves out important documents without hesitation as soon as he finds them not entirely for the benefit of his hero. The same will take place when he writes the biography of Gneisenau, for which the hand of a tactician would seem to be the first desideratum.
The pious quaker-sheet was already known to me; one could hardly have thought such monstrosities practicable in the English language! But our time abounds in such. The psychographer takes the place of the moving table; they try to enforce my faith in the absurdity; I excuse myself, that at my time of life a man is a little backward, and that I have just arrived at table moving, but of that they do not want to hear any more. This reminds me of something, I will not suppress! It of course happens often, that remarks of your Excellency, in particular such made at the royal table, come to the ears of the public, and are repeated with zeal, and by this assume widely different forms; thus, quite recently, a reply to Herr Senfft von Pilsach, in which the original form seemed lost to a great extent, it would certainly be desirable if the latter were always authentically preserved.
With my repeated most heartfelt thanks, in most faithful reverence and submission, I remain immutably, your Excellency’s most obedient,
Varnhagen von Ense.
Varnhagen von Ense.
Varnhagen von Ense.
Varnhagen von Ense.
Some strong expressions in the London letter, as welcome to me as they were unexpected, remind me that Herr von Radowitz indulged in similar ones, and even had them printed (Gesammelte Schriften IV., 210, 256, 281); in the second passage he even goes so far as to reverse the motto, “Against democrats soldiers alone avail!”