59.

Berlin,May 17th, 1841.

[Written at Varnhagen’s. With the preface to Wilhelm von Humboldt’s works.]

I am very sorry not to be enabled amid the annoyances of to-morrow’s departure (first to Potsdam, then to Paris, until October) to bid you farewell. I appeal to you once more as the source, until Rückert’s arrival, the only source of good taste, of pure language, and of a delicate appreciation of the appropriate sense. Tell me with all indulgence what I ought to strike out from the enclosed preface, but give me also your advice wherever you find fault. I wrote the two pages atnight in a gloomy frame of mind. They show perhaps a too sentimental disposition to praise.

Page 1, line 2, “yet” because it happens during my life time. Line 10, “The highly giftedsouls,” perhaps displeasing. Should it bemen?

A. v. Humboldt.

On the 21st of November, Varnhagen wrote down the following about Humboldt:

“I read to-day the dispatches which Al. von Humboldt addressed to the King from Paris in the year 1835. They are not like Humboldt! Any body else could have writtensuchdispatches—nay, what is still worse, nobody could have written them otherwise! Thus it is, however, with political business—it consists of mere trifles, not at all important in themselves, but becoming important because everybody has agreed to consider them so. Thus the established hypocrisy of forms, presumptions, and exaggerations drown the truth. I looked into myself and confessed that were I engaged in such affairs, I, too, would follow in the beaten track; and yet people wonder that in England and France editors of newspapers become ministers, as if it were not infinitely more easy to write the usual dispatches than good newspaper articles.”

Back to Index Next