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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 177: 169. 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.

169.
HUMBOLDT TO VARNHAGEN.

Berlin, January 13th, 1856.

Smile, dear friend (you are fully justified!) at the strange lines of Princess Lieven, and at my troublesome inquiry. Madame de Quitzow, who has not written to me for twenty-five years, wants to know, whether the Emperor Paul, in the epoch of his political insanity, had made the proposition through Kotzebue, that the ministers for foreign affairs should measure swords personally instead of the armies. I was at that time (1799 and 1800) in the deltas of South America, and was entirely ignorant of the anecdote which the Russian Princess now, as it appears to me, so occidental in her predilections, desires to corroborate. The obscure researches I have made would seem to lead to the result that the duel was to be waged not by the ministers but by the monarchs themselves. I pray you, noble friend, to write me a few lines on what your excellent memory supplies, and still more I pray you to tell me consoling words about your health at the return of the injurious cold weather. Bunsen writes me that he expects a fourth edition of his letters. Does the great reading demand for this excellent or rather useful book indicate that the German public is less chloroformed against action than we had supposed? Dubito. The German landlord of a (dicunt) very dirty hotel, which glories in my name in California for many years—beside a more cleanly one of “Jenny Lind,”—sends me German California papers from time to time. In a discourse on the moral and intellectual state of the English, the French, and the Germans, the editor recently said: “We Germans are a nation of thinkers, deeply occupied with the world of ideas, we also have the great advantage before the members of other nations who live here, that we care little or not at all about civil or political affairs.” Thus we boast on the shores of the Pacific, buy the “Zeichen der Zeit,” but hardly 5 per cent of us go to the primary elections. It is inconvenient, we think. With old love and reverence,

Yours,
A. v. Humboldt.

Was not the young Tyrolese very amiable poet Adolf Pichler (properly speaking a geologist by trade) with you? I do not believe in peace during this quite ... or at least uncomfortable humiliating ... ...[77] year, though certainly in useless diplomatic transactions.

Note by Varnhagen.—In the third line stands “Madame de Quitzow,” clearly a mistake instead of “Madame de Lieven.” What may have been the reason that that name, here entirely without meaning, should have protruded itself, cannot be guessed.
Later Note by Varnhagen.—The Princess Lieven is closely connected with the late Minister Guizot, they even say secretly married to him. Guizot, pronounced German easily sounds Quitzow, a well-known name in the Mark. Humboldt, always inclined to jesting, and particularly here, may have given her this surname—perhaps current already at the court—with full intention. [This is quite right.]