Very thankfully, yours,
Humboldt.
Note by Varnhagen.—I selected “which he handled with a freedom of which he was perfectly conscious,” as most in accordance with the metaphor of the fetters, and as otherwise clearly indicative of the idea intended to be conveyed.
Varnhagen reports under date of September 9th, 1853, in his diary: “Humboldt had advised me of his coming; he came about half-past one o’clock, and remained till half-past two o’clock, a mere visit, nothing of business; he felt the necessity of unburdening himself of many things. First he vented his bitter and indignant scorn on the speeches of the King in Elbing and Hirschberg, and on the utter absence of vigor, which makes itself known in such disconnected ebullitions. Then he spoke with the utmost contempt of von Raumer, the Minister of Public Worship and Instruction, of his brutality and insolence, his hatred of all science, his pernicious activity. ‘The King,’ Humboldt said, ‘hates and despises all his ministers, but this one particularly, and speaks of him as of an ass; what particularly nettles him is, that Raumer opposes all the King’s wishes, and he keeps him in office nevertheless, as he keeps all of them, because he has them, and every change is a troublesome affair.’ The case of the brothers Schlagintweit was cited as an instance. The King wished to aid them in their voyage to the Himalaya Mountains; the minister refused; the King ordered him to hear the opinion of Humboldt, which was a most favorable one, but Raumer insisted upon his opinion, which, he said, was not changed by Humboldt. Then the King, who confessed himself to be powerless against his minister, wrote to Bunsen, who took the matter in hand, and the brothers Schlagintweit now receive English aid. And the very same King, who pretends to be so jealous of his prerogatives, permits them to be thus encroached upon? ‘Yes, sometimes he delights in playing the part of a constitutional monarch, absolves himself from all responsibility when the matter is a delicate one, answers demands made upon him by adverting to the difficulty of obtaining the signatures of his ministers, and even pretends to regard that “baggage, the state” as something with which he had little concern, accuses the ministers of forgetting him in their devotion to that “baggage, the state,” &c., &c.
“‘In the asking of small sums the King often experiences the greatest resistance, large ones he gets; he is refused three hundred thalers for a poor scientific man or artist, forty thousand thalers for buying something, they dare not refuse. What a mess of confusion and disaster! The King is quite satisfied that he is permitted to cook up church matters to his heart’s content, for these are considered separate from the state, no minister has a word in them.’ That I do not understand and it cannot be so, the ministers I believe have their hands in it too. ‘The meanest fellow of the whole concern is privy counsellor Niebuhr, a low, canting parasite, full of spite and venom.
“‘Garcia cannot sing here, he said some time ago, she is too red;[[59]] all representations, that her singing would not be red, were in vain. At last I told him to send to Bethania[[60]] for deaconesses to sing. He will be happy to see me under the sod.’”
On the 25th of September, Varnhagen narrates in his diary: “They say, on the presence of Humboldt in the High Ecclesiastical Council, that the priests had had in their midst their greatest adversary, who puts all of them to rout—the man of natural science, before whom all their mist and deceits flow into nothingness. ‘Abaellino is among you!’ one might have cried out.”
155.
HUMBOLDT TO VARNHAGEN.
Berlin, Dec. 12th, 1853.
Again, my noble friend, you have shown your skill in giving me pleasure. After our departure from Potsdam, which transformed itself entirely into a Buddhistic “cold hell,” was prevented for a long time by the delicate health of the Queen, I at last moved over here on Saturday. You have shed renown upon the Prussian arms, and, what touches me in a more human manner, on the warrior of many-sided culture.[[61]] The gallery of your biographies stands in singular grandeur in our German literature. I am enraged by the treatment of my friend Arago in the last number of the “Quarterly Review” (September)—an ebullition of political party spirit, exactly as I was treated by the same journal from 1810–1818. A note at the end of the number for September says, with rare delicacy, that the article was written before his death was known; but it was known generally in London that he had become blind, and that he suffered infinitely from dropsy, one of the symptoms of which is to fill the mind with apprehensions.