Blackwood's Edinburgh magazine, Vol. 71, No. 439, May, 1852

by Various

In this philologist, however, there was no want of poetic feeling or vivid imagination. When reading the ancients, he completely lived in their world and with them. He once told a friend who had called on him and found him in great emotion, that he often could not bear to read more than a few pages at a time in the old tragic poets; he realised so vividly all that was said, and done, and suffered. “He could see Antigone leading her blind father—the aged Œdipus entering the grove—he could catch the music of their speech.” Neither in this youth, so stored, so fed with books, was there any deadness of heart towards the living friend. We have some letters full of a painful sensitiveness at the apprehension that his correspondent had forgotten or grown cold towards him. The gravest fault in his character was too quick a temper; but if this led him to take offence unjustly, he was always sufficiently just and generous to seek for reconciliation. Least of all had his erudition or his erudite labours quenched the moral enthusiasm of his nature. From childhood up to manhood, from manhood to his latest day, the same high sense of moral rectitude pervaded all his judgments, and influenced all his actions. The same boy who would not receive praise if he did not think he deserved it, in after years would not draw a salary if he did not think it was rigidly earned, nor accept a present even from a municipality—from the city of Geneva—for rendering a service which he had spontaneously performed. At the university of Kiel we find him breaking with an intimate friend, and much to his own regret, because he finds that friend holding philosophical tenets destructive, as he thinks, of the sentiment of moral obligation. “He is a fatalist and indifferentist. I subscribe to Kant’s principles with all my heart. I have broken with M., not from any dispute we have had, but on account of the detestable conclusions which necessarily follow from his opinions, conclusions that absolutely annihilate morality. I really loved him notwithstanding, but, with such principles, I could not be his friend.” Considering the singular and precarious tenure by which a Kantian holds his faith in the freedom of the will, this was rather severe dealing, not a quite perfect example of philosophical toleration; but it shows, at least, that the heart was in the right place.

Up to this moment have not the fairies done well? But now comes a new element into the calculations, a new phase of the drama, with which no fairies condescend to deal. Young Niebuhr like the rest of us must live, must earn the wherewithal, must choose his career, his profession. Here the fairies forsake him. Here, in more true and prosaic style, he is unfaithful to himself. We cannot but regard it as the great and continuous error of his life, that he did not devote himself to learning as his profession. He could have done so. At the very same time there came an offer of a professorship, and a proposal to be the private secretary of Count Schimmelman, the Danish minister of finance. He chose the latter. That the professorship offered to him was connected with but slender emolument, can have had little to do with the determination, because other and more eminent and more lucrative professorships would have speedily been open to him, and because the mere love of money was never a strong inducement in the mind of Niebuhr. Political ambition seems to have been the motive that turned the scale. Looking now at his life as an accomplished completed career, it is impossible not to regret this choice. We see ten of the most precious years of his early manhood wasted in financial and other public business, which a hundred others could have transacted as well; it is, in fact, a mere fragment of his life that is exclusively or uninterruptedly devoted to letters. He is more frequently at the head of some national bank, or revenue department, than in the professor’s chair; and the author of the Roman history has to say of himself, that “calculations are my occupation; merchants, Jews, and brokers, my society.”

Niebuhr had, whilst at the university, formed an acquaintance which led afterwards to a matrimonial engagement. Amelia Behrens, younger sister of Madame Hensler, who was the daughter-in-law of the Professor Hensler previously mentioned, seems from the first to have thoroughly appreciated the high character and great attainments of the young student. She herself must have been a woman of very superior mind; she had great sweetness of temper, and was in every way calculated for the wife of the ardent, generous, hasty, but affectionate Niebuhr. The first mention that is made of Miss Behrens is not very auspicious. In a letter to his father, he has been lamenting his painful timidity and bashfulness before ladies, and thus continues,—“However much I may improve in other society, I am sure I must get worse and worse every day in their eyes; and so, out of downright shyness, I scarcely dare speak to a lady; and as I know, once for all, that I must be insupportable to them, their presence becomes disagreeable to me. Yesterday, however, I screwed up my courage, and began to talk to Miss Behrens and young Mrs Hensler. Now, in gratitude and candour, I must confess that they were sociable enough towards me to have set me at my ease, if my shyness were not so deeply rooted. But it is of no use. I avoid them, and would rather be guilty of impoliteness, by avoiding them, than by speaking to them, which I should now feel to be the greatest impoliteness of all.” Circumstances, however, after he had left the university of Kiel, brought him into social and unreserved communication with the family of the Behrens; and this lady whom he avoided, dreading her precisely because she did interest his youthful imagination, became his betrothed.

Here the biography takes a very eccentric course. Niebuhr not only comes to England on foreign travel, which is precisely what we should expect of such a person, but he settles himself down at Edinburgh as a student. The life seems to go back. After having entered on official duties, engaged himself to be married, and thus pledged himself to the real business of life, we see this erudite youth, with his tale of twenty languages nearly complete, entering the classes at Edinburgh, and writing about them as if he were recommencing his university career. If this work of Madame Hensler were one of old date, and we felt authorised to exercise upon it that conjectural criticism so fashionable in our times, we should boldly say that the authoress, deceived by the similarity of name, had intercalated into her series some letters of another Niebuhr; we should dispute the identity of the Niebuhr who writes from the university of Edinburgh, with him who passed through the university of Kiel, and was afterwards, for a short time, secretary to Count Schimmelman. Such conjectural emendations being, however, altogether inadmissible, we must accept the facts and the letters as they are here given us.

Niebuhr’s motives for this residence in Scotland were, according to Madame Hensler’s account, of a very miscellaneous description. Besides the advantages to be derived from visiting a foreign land, “he was to brace up and strengthen both his mental and physical energies in preparation for active life.” Why this should be better accomplished as a student in Edinburgh than as a citizen in Copenhagen, we do not apprehend; nor what there was in the air of Denmark that had enfeebled the spirit of self-reliance or of enterprise. But we are told that “he had become too dependent on the little details of life. He felt that he stood, so to speak, outside the world of realities.” Therefore he sets himself down for a year as a student at Edinburgh.

London, of course, is first visited. He speaks highly of the English. Throughout his life he entertained a predilection for our countrymen, and extols the integrity and honesty of the national character. We feel a certain bashfulness, a modest confusion, when we hear such praises; but, as national characters nowhere stand very high, we suppose we may accept the compliment. Occasionally we sell our patriotic votes, as at St Alban’s and elsewhere; occasionally we fill our canisters of preserved meats with poisonous offal; and there is not a grocer’s shop in all England where some adulterated article of food is not cheerfully disposed of. Nevertheless, it seems we are a shade more honest than some of our neighbours. The compliment does not greatly rejoice us.

However, it is not all praise that we receive. He finds “that true warm-heartedness is extremely rare” amongst us. We shall be happy to learn that it is commonly to be met with in any part of the world. He laments, too, the superficiality and insipidity of general conversation. “That narrative and commonplaces form the whole staple of conversation, from which all philosophy is excluded—that enthusiasm and loftiness of expression are entirely wanting, depresses me more than any personal neglect of which, as a stranger, I might have to complain. I am, besides, fully persuaded that I shall find things very different in Scotland; of this I am assured by several Scotchmen whom I already know.”

In this full persuasion he sets forth to Scotland. We have an account of his journey, which, read in these railroad times, is amusing enough. The translator of the letters has evidently been determined that we should not miss the humour of the contrast. Niebuhr gives his absent Amelia as minute a description of the mode of travelling as if he were writing from China. After describing the post-chaises, “very pretty half-coaches, holding two,” and the royal mail, rapid, “but inconvenient from the smallness of its build, and particularly liable to be upset,” he proceeds to the old-fashioned stage-coach—

“In travelling by this, you have no further trouble than to take your place in the office for as far as you wish to go; for the proprietor of the coach has, at each stage, which are from ten to fifteen English miles at most from each other, relays of horses, which, unless an unusual amount of travelling causes an exception, stand ready harnessed to be put to the coach. Four horses, drawing a coach with six persons inside, four on the roof, a sort of conductor beside the coachman, and overladen with luggage, have to get over seven English miles in the hour; and, as the coach goes on without ever stopping, except at the principal stages, it is not surprising that you can traverse the whole extent of the country in so few days. But, for any length of time, this rapid motion is quite too unnatural. You can only get a very piecemeal view of the country from the windows, and, with the tremendous speed with which you go, can keep no object long in sight; you are unable also to stop at any place.”

After three days’ travelling “at this tremendous speed,” he reached Newcastle, from which the above letter was dated. The rest of the journey was also performed with the same unnatural rapidity. By some chance he made acquaintance with a young medical student, and the two together commenced housekeeping in Edinburgh on a very frugal and sensible plan.