In 1815 he wrote: “True German feeling it is to welcome all that is noble and good, out of all ages and nations, as our own. Every one now, with narrow minds, is Nibelungen-mad, barbaric-mad”; and concerning his Life of Alfred he says:
“Alfred belongs to us, and therefore do I wish to hold him up to the veneration and imitation, and for the teaching, of my children. But not only do Alfred and his people belong to us; we should also make our own all that is great and noble in the life of all nations, yet without losing thereby our own individuality.”
In 1805 the decree freeing the serfs in the Duchy of Holstein went into effect, and Stolberg congratulates his brother Christian on this happy event; naturally, the greater event of the abolition of negro slavery in the British West Indies was a great joy to him, and he rejoiced the more that the Illuminati, his special aversion, lost thereby their best weapon against England, and that the French Declaration of the Rights of Man could be unfavorably compared with the English constitution, on account of a contradictory law, at that time still in force, forbidding the liberation of the negroes in French colonies to be even mentioned before the legislature. The alliances, dictated by fear or by interest, of German sovereigns with Napoleon were a subject of great grief and indignation to him, and he looked upon England with almost exaggerated admiration because she withstood the conqueror. He said “Pitt would save England against Europe’s will,” and his confidence in the general policy of the English statesman was unbounded. He had, too, a kind of historical admiration, if we may so call it, for the English form of government, which alone he thought proper for freedom, but which he did not believe fit for the wants of every nation, indiscriminately, on the Continent. It strikes us, however, that the fact of the English constitution, in its then state, being nearly a hundred and fifty years old had somewhat blinded his mind to the facts—according to his theory, rather suspicious, to say the least—of the change of dynasty in 1688; for the Stuarts in England were surely as legitimate sovereigns, from his point of view, as the Bourbons in France, whose least advances, in the person of Louis XVIII., towards the modern spirit so incensed and disgusted Stolberg; and when he said that “England alone stood in the breach” against Napoleon, he forgot that she considered it her interest to withstand him, and that a deeply-rooted prejudice egged on the nation against him. If he had seen anything of the unreasoning panic which the threatened invasion caused among the English, he would have been less ready to jest at the falling through of the scheme, which he called “an expedition to gather mussels along the British shores.” It has often been so, we think, among Continental statesmen and thinkers: they look upon England with exceptionally favorable eyes and weigh her doings in special balances, forgetting the lawless and riotous disturbances that she experienced earlier than other countries, after which she settled into the solid, steady, conservative, law-abiding, slow-to-be-moved nation which she had been for over a hundred years when the French Revolution suddenly broke out. Stolberg, much as he praised England, almost refused to see any good in the chaos of new ideas that were seething pell-mell together; he saw nothing but the evident godlessness, selfishness, pride, and cruelty which marked that era; and, indeed, he, the man of another age, the lover of a lofty ideal which we shall mention presently—the man who said that “all politics hinged on the Fourth Commandment”—could hardly be expected to allow that out of such confusion God could glean anything worthy of being offered to himself.
Stolberg often called Germany the “heart of Europe,” and wrote an ode with that title; but he would not allow with the innovators that the “philosophy” of the age was the true source of the influence his country should have on the Continent. Allied to this false idea of many Germans was the affected custom, in the early part of the century, of using the French language instead of the mother-tongue, even in the nearest domestic intercourse—a fault which the Russians also fell into, but which at present they have seen the folly of and have nearly successfully remedied. Stolberg heartily hated and despised this foreign intrusion into German home-life.
“Even in my younger days,” he says with scorn, “I can remember hearing of a gifted German girl being reproached by German women with being 'affected’ enough to write 'German’ letters.... Germans now write to each other, brother to brother, husband to wife, in French.... Is that not to estrange one’s self from one’s nearest and dearest? nay, even from one’s self?”
His relations and correspondence with well-known people of his day furnish us with his opinions on many of the writers, savants, statesmen, and philosophers, the reigning and rising public men. Of the historian Johann Müller he says:
“No one ever seized the true spirit of history so early in life as he did.... His life is very interesting; it is true he showed a good deal of vanity, but also so much cheerful good-humor that one does not feel inclined to be hard upon him for the former. His plan of study, as he arranged it for himself, and the scrupulous way in which he followed it out, seem to me truly noteworthy.... What a comprehensive spirit, what feeling and sympathy for the true, the good, and the beautiful! How early, too, he broke loose from the unwisdom of the philosophy of the times, and how deep a religious spirit remained firm in him in the midst of many disturbances, since he so clearly understood the history of the world by the light of that Providence whose finger he was always tracing in it! He once said very beautifully that Christ was the key to the world s history.”
In 1807 he gives the following opinion of Alexander von Humboldt:
“I know Humboldt personally. He has much understanding, much liveliness, much industry. But is he not inclined to be too much enslaved by the German à priori tendency and by a love of the scientific form? Is he strong enough not to let himself be carried away by the method of modern criticism, which tends to violent disruption from all that has gone before, instead of tracing out the great analogies on the path of simple observation? Is he quite free from a delicate and imperceptible charlatanism? Years may have matured him, but such maturing seldom takes place when the quick strides of science make it difficult for wisdom to keep up with her.”
Of Frederick Schlegel’s poetry, and that of others in the Dichtergarten (or “Poet’s Garden,” a collection of fugitive songs by various poets), he writes: