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Letters of Alexander von Humboldt to Varnhagen von Ense. / From 1827 to 1858. With extracts from Varnhagen's diaries, and letters of Varnhagen and others to Humboldt cover

Letters of Alexander von Humboldt to Varnhagen von Ense. / From 1827 to 1858. With extracts from Varnhagen's diaries, and letters of Varnhagen and others to Humboldt

Chapter 169: 161. HUMBOLDT TO VARNHAGEN.
By Alexander von Humboldt
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Essays, Letters & SpeechesGerman LiteratureHistory - Modern (1750+)

About This Book

A curated correspondence collects letters from Alexander von Humboldt to his friend and confidant Varnhagen von Ense, supplemented by diary excerpts and letters from other contemporaries. The missives blend personal friendship with professional exchange, discussing scientific observations, lectures, manuscripts, travels, and reactions to peers and events. Editorial apparatus preserves original phrasing and provides contextual notes and extracts that illuminate relationships and chronology. The selection highlights the writer’s methods of observation, precise descriptive habits, and modes of intellectual collaboration. Together the documents form a compact portrait of an engaged scholar whose private reflections and public endeavors intersect across a wide range of topics.

161.
HUMBOLDT TO VARNHAGEN.

Berlin, July 9th, 1854.

Returning from the Russian Saint’s day celebrated in Sans Souci, I found your amiable letter. As I cannot refuse you anything, I add Hippolytus! Satisfy in return my curiosity. I believe that I never in my life spoke to Herr Senfft von Pilsach; I might meet him in the street or in society without knowing him. Notwithstanding all this I may have dined with him at the King’s. After what I heard of him I do not feel well affected towards him. Since I always sit opposite the King, I talk aloud only to him, but very freely, because I know that it will be reported, colored certainly according to the color of the reporter, and this the more especially in a country where anything like a gentle allusion by way of criticism is lost on account of the complete want of development of conversational language.

The judgment of Gneisenau is certainly on my brother. These often are ebullitions of the moment. Schiller writes to Koerner, when I arrived in Jena, “that I was by far more ingenious and gifted than my brother;” afterwards, in a time when he saw me daily and overwhelmed me with tenderness, he wrote to Koerner that “I was a man of narrow understanding, without poetry or soul, who, in spite of all my restless activity in my walk of study, never would accomplish anything great; that Herder’s works were diseases, discharged by his mental constitution.” (One thinks it is a passage of Zelter’s letters!) In an autograph of a collection at Augsburg, which they wanted to give to me, but which I sent back, my friend Prince S. writes to Koreff: “Alexander H. again accompanies the King to the Congress at Aachen only as a pointer!” Thus they play on the boards of the world for credulous posterity.

The Emperor Alexander had told the late King that my brother was doubtless bribed by the Jews to be of service to them in the Congress of Vienna, as Baron von Buelow was bribed in the Belgian affair by the French, according to the King of Hanover. In Schoening’s very interesting War of the Bavarian Succession, interesting by the correspondence with Prince Heinrich and the reflection cast on the present disputable state of things, there is mentioned on p. 294, a political project, which was unknown to me, the Austrian proposition to give Burgundy as a kingdom to the Bavarian dynasty in return for a cession of Bavaria. This title of King of Burgundy was the object of the ambition of the Duke of M. in 1815, though he would have contented himself with Lorraine and Alsatia. Napoleon also once had a momentary intention to make the Principe de la Paz, King of Baetica (Andalusia and Grenada) from recollections of “Télémaque,” and the King of Sardinia, Roi de Numidie, although the donor had not a foot of land in Africa to dispose of.

With warm friendship, always equally incorrect and illegible, your most faithful,

A. v. Humboldt.
Saturday Night.
Note by Varnhagen.—As early as the year 1743, Austria offered to the Emperor Charles VII. a kingdom not yet conquered, to be composed of Alsace, Lorraine, and Franche Comté, in return for Bavaria. See “Mem. de Noailles,” Tome vi.