My dear M.,—Having returned home last night, I should like to see you quietly to-day, before the turmoil begins again to-morrow. Can you and Mr. Trithen come to me to-day at five o'clock? I will ask Elze to dinner, but I should first like to read to you two my treatise “On the Classification of Languages,” which is entirely rewritten, and has become my fifth book in nuce.
I will at once tell you that I am convinced that the Lycians were the true Pelasgians, and I shall not give you any rest till you have discovered the Pelasgic language from the monuments existing here. It is a sure discovery. It must be an older form of Greek, much as the Oscan or the Carmen Saliare were of Latin, or even perhaps more so.
[3.]
I landed yesterday, and took refuge here till this afternoon; and my first employment is to thank you for your affectionate and faithful letter, and to tell you that I am not only to be here as hitherto, but that, with the permission of the King, I am to fill the post of confidential accredited minister of the Reichsverweser, formerly held by Baron Andrian. During my stay here, be it long or short, it will always be a pleasure and refreshment [pg 397] to me to see you as often as you can come to us. You know our way of living, which will remain the same, except now and then, when Palmerston may fix his conferences for a Sunday.
Pertz is quite ready to agree to the proposal of a regular completion of the Chambers collection: the best thing would be for you to offer to make the catalogue. He is waiting your proposal. The dark clouds of civil war are lowering over our dear and mighty Fatherland. Prussia will go on its own way quietly as a mediating power.
[4.]
Yesterday evening, and night, and this morning early, I have been reading Froude's “Nemesis of Faith,” and am so moved by it that I must write you a few lines. I cannot describe the power of attraction exercised upon me by this deeply searching, noble spirit: I feel the tragic nature of his position, and long have I foreseen that such tragical combinations await the souls of men in this island-world. Arnold and Carlyle, each in his own way, had seen this long before me. In the general world, no one can understand such a state of mind, except so far as to be enabled to misconstrue it.
In the shortcoming of the English mind in judging of this book, its great alienation from the philosophy of Art is revealed. This book is not comprehended as a work of Art, claiming as such due proportions and relative significance of parts; otherwise many individuals would at least have been moved to a more sparing judgment upon it, and in the first place they would take in the import of the title.
This book shows the fatal result of the renunciation of the Church system of belief. The subject of the tale simply experiences moral annihilation; but the object of his affection, whose mind he had been the means of unsettling in her faith, burst through the boundaries which humanity has placed, and the moral order of the world imposes: they perish both,—each at odds with self, with God, and with human society: only for him there yet remains room for further development. Then the curtain falls,—that is right, according to artistic rule of composition; true and necessary according to the views of those who hold the faith of the Church of England; and from a theological point of view, no other solution could be expected from the book than that which it has given.
But here the author has disclosed the inward disease, the fearful hollowness, the spiritual death, of the nation's philosophical and theological forms, with resistless eloquence; and like the Jews of old, they will exclaim, “That man is a criminal! stone him!”