This book makes on me the effect of a pedagogic exuberance. Even the occasional good views (on harmony, for example) that it contains are obscured by a self-sufficiency in the tone and manner of them, of which one may well complain as insupportable. What Raff wishes to appear spoils four-fifths (to quote the time which he adapts so ridiculously to "Lohengrin" of what he might be. He is perpetually getting on scientific stilts, which are by no means of a very solid wood. Philosophic formulas are sometimes the envelope, the outside shell, as it were, of knowledge; but it may also happen that they only show empty ideas, and contain no other substance than their own harsh terminology. To demonstrate the rose by the ferule may seem a very scientific proceeding to vulgar pedants; for my part it is not to my taste; and without being unjust to the rare qualities of Raff's talent, which I have long truly appreciated, his book seems to me to belong too much to the domain of moral and artistic pathology for it to help in placing questions of Art in their right light.
I beg you, dear friend, not to repeat this to anybody, for I could not go against Raff in any but the most extreme case, for which I hope he will not give me any occasion. Against the many charges to which he has exposed himself I even intend to shield him as far as possible, but I am very much grieved that he has mingled so much that is raw and untenable in his book with much that is good, true and right.
Farewell, dear friend, and give most friendly greetings to your wife from
Yours most sincerely,
F. Liszt
August 12th, 1854
In the "Favorita" article a great error has been allowed to remain. "No lover, no knight behaves thus"—and not "A lover behaves thus," etc. Send me at once the proofs of the "Weisse Dame", and in September bring the "Fliegende Hollander", which must not wait any longer.
I am now working at my Faust Symphony. The three-keyboard instrument arrived yesterday from Paris. It might be well to take the opportunity of my Catalogue appearing at Hartel's to see about a special article on it in your paper.
119. To Anton Rubinstein
[August, 1854]