Hold me in kind remembrance, even as I am cordially devoted to you.
F. LISZT
WEYMAR, July 29th, 1849
P.S.—Be careful in your articles in the newspapers to omit all political allusions to Germany, and leave royal princes alone. In case there should be an opportunity of paying Weymar a modest compliment en passant, give free vent to your reminiscences with the necessary kid gloves.
25.
DEAR LISZT,
I herewith send you my last finished work; it is a new version of the original article which I sent to Paris last week to have it translated for the feuilleton of the National. Whether you will be pleased with it I do not know, but I feel certain that your nature is at one with me. I hope you will find in it nothing of the political commonplaces, socialistic balderdash, or personal animosities, against which you warned me; but that, in the deepest depth of things, I see what I see, is entirely owing to the circumstance that my own artistic nature and the sufferings it has to go through have opened my eyes in such a manner that death alone can close them again. I look forward either to an entirely useless existence, or to an activity which responds to my inmost being, even if I have to exercise it afar from all external splendour. In the former case I should have to think of abbreviating that existence.
Please address and send the manuscript, together with the enclosed letter, to the publisher Otto Wigand in Leipzig. Perhaps I shall succeed in drawing from my inferior literary faculty some small support for my existence. Since my last letter, which I posted at the same time with my stormy petition to you, I have had no news from my wife, and am slightly tortured accordingly.
From a letter written by Baron Schober to Eck at Zurich, I see with great pleasure that your prospects are cheerful, and that you are resolved to settle in Weimar. I presume that the excellent Princess is also happy and well. Heaven be thanked! Whether you ought to show her my manuscript I am not quite certain; in it I am so much of a Greek that I have not been able quite to convert myself to Christianity. But what nonsense I talk! As if you were not the right people! Pardon me.
Farewell, dear, unique friend! Remember me in kindness.