258d. Ludwig Ferdinand Huber to Wilhelm Schlegel in Jena: Stuttgart, 9/11 January 1800 [*]
Stuttgart, 9 January 1800
Well, well, well, it seems more people are now dealing with one another in both writing and in person who in their hearts do view one another just as we now declare out loud that the one thinks of the other.
I shall not for a moment be led astray by the suggestion that your view of my “simpleness” commenced only with my last letter to you, and only with my review, since, after all, you had already read and heard considerably more by and about me before that. I for my part consider you as little to be described as “simple” as I do myself. Hence, e.g., your persiflage of the review of Der hyperboreische Esel is, in its own way, utterly charming. [1]
You could have spared yourself the note concerning the quiet allusion to what I, in my letter to you, declared to be highly disgraceful, since much was also qualified quite differently in my letter to you than in the review of Athenaeum. When the review of the little hussar finally appears and provides the measure of fun for you as promised, you will find that I in fact do not merely quietly touch on what seemed to me to beg a more forceful treatment. [2]
As little as, according to Caroline’s judgment and erudition, I may understand about the Greek language and about philosophy and poesy — in a word: about everything in which all of you are such masters — I am and remain nonetheless convinced that the grand things that are of such importance to all of you in your efforts, be they genuinely grand, so grand indeed that I have not the slightest intimation of them — that these things cannot possibly be promoted by the little hussar, by the “Fragmente,” by “Blütenstaub,” the “Litterarischer Reichsanzeiger,” the harsh, ponderous, utterly un-Goethean poesy of the translations from the Greek, etc. [3] — indeed, that even the best you are producing, your subtle critiques of Lafontaine and others, your most palatable essays in Athenaeum, are still far, far removed from promoting grand things. [4]
I will continue to maintain that there will perhaps come a time when you yourself will find that bizarre or preciously flowery phrases, harsh verses, pretensions of exclusivity in cases of both admiration and belittling etc. constitute a far more repugnant and pedantic pedantry than the pedantry of reasonable behavior. You are, by the way, quite consistent in your own present disposition in deriding my pedantry and the resulting tragic tone in my first letter. I anticipated the probability of your consistency when I wrote my letter, and am now pleased to take the entire matter au comique from my own perspective, just as you do from your own.
I am utterly at a loss [5] to divine what my own free and unaffected opinion concerning Athenaeum, Lucinde, etc. has to do with the present, enormous struggle between darkness and light, despotism and freedom, humdrum and reason, or what it has to do with Napoleon and Paul, with Siéyès and Pitt. Your literary style, your verses, your ideas are new, powerful, flowing, natural, and clear . . . or they are not.
I cannot see that aristocracy or democracy has the least thing to do with that, except perhaps the way Collot d’Herbois considered the citizens of Lyon to be aristocrats worthy of being gunned down for having booed him off the stage. The citizens of Lyon genuinely were horrible aristocrats, and thus there may well be among your own opponents genuine enemies, or rather ambiguous friends of light and freedom; but their business with you has as little to do with light and freedom as does Collot’s performance on stage. All my reasonable reviewing and all your arch-German Ultra-German-ness will ultimately be of precious little consequence for the happiness and development of future generations.
I am too gallant to say that a letter from a lady is unworthy of being sent back to its owner; [6] I am too honest to demand such return explicitly; hence let me merely repeat what I wrote in case Caroline would not perhaps prefer to have it.
Stay very well.
L. F. Huber
11 January
I wrote the above in my initial mood after receiving your letter but did not hasten to send it off, since there was no really pressing reason to do so. Cotta, however, just sent me a letter from you along with a declaration of your brother. [7] This is something too serious for me to neglect to send you a copy of my declaration, which I am sending to Cotta this very moment with the request to print both as soon as possible in a supplement.
The tone of our other relationships has no place here; nor do I doubt for even a single second that you or your brother could doubt the truth of a single word in my own declaration. When I read the announcement in the supplement, I countenanced for one repugnant moment the material possibility of a misunderstanding, but even more strongly the moral impossibility.
I am pleased that according to your brother’s declaration Falk is innocent; it seems to tend to Reinhard, who had not occurred to me [8] — though I would have thought Falk too good for such arch-infamy.
Notes
[*] Source: Ludwig Geiger, Dichter und Frauen. Abhandlungen und Mitteilungen. Neue Sammlung (Berlin 1899), 114–16. This letter is the response to Wilhelm’s letter to Huber on 28 December 1799 (letter 258a).
Rudolf Haym, Die romantische Schule, 727fn*, remarks that Huber’s response here “quite deftly turns many of the points of Schlegel’s own missive back onto the latter.” Back.
[1] Huber’s remarks here refer largely to the final paragraph in Wilhelm’s letter to him of 28 December 1799 (letter 258). For the text of Huber’s review of August von Kotzebue’s, Der hyperboreische Esel oder die heutige Bildung. Ein drastisches Drama, und philosophisches Lustspiel für Jünglinge in einem Akt (Leipzig 1799), see supplementary appendix 250.1. Back.
[2] Wilhelm had referred in his earlier letter (letter 258a) to Friedrich Schlegel’s novel Lucinde as the “little hussar” of the “Notizen” and “Fragments” in Athenaeum; see note 8 in that letter. Back.
[3] The “Fragmente” appeared in Athenaeum (1798) 179–322; Friedrich von Hardenberg’s collection of fragments, “Blüthenstaub,” on 70–106 of that volume, the scandalous “Litterarischer Reichsanzeiger” in Athenaeum (1799) 328–40, and Wilhelm and Friedrich’s “Elegien aus dem Griechischen” in Athenaeum (1799) 107–40. Back.
[4] The review of Lafontaine, “Mode-Romane. Lafontaine,” in “Beyträge zur Kritik der neuesten Litteratur,” appeared in Athenaeum (1798) 149–67; not insignificantly, is was authored by Caroline. Back.
[5] In English in original. Back.
[6] I.e., Caroline’s letter to Huber on 24/27 November 1799 (letter 257); Huber had returned it, and Wilhelm in his own turn offered to resend it should Huber wish, though for the time being Wilhelm thought it better that it not “ride back and forth in the postal coach between Jena and Stuttgart.” Back.
[7] The cause of this episode was an insulting advertisement for the anonymous pasquinade Diogenes Laterne by Daniel Jenisch (Leipzig 1799) that appeared in the supplement Cotta’s Allgemeine Zeitung (1799) (15 December) (of which Huber was the editor); see Christian Gottfried Schütz’s letter to Wilhelm on 20 October 1799 (letter 249c) with note 6, and, for Friedrich’s reaction and his subsequent exchange with Huber, Friedrich’s letter to Fichte on 3 November 1799 (letter 252g) and supplementary appendix 252g.1. Back.
[8] Huber corrects his mistaken reference to Karl Reinhard in his follow-up letter to Wilhelm on 16 January 1799 (letter 258j). Back.
Translation © 2013 Doug Stott