was so. The King and Court were not to blame for this. It was honourable to the King to honour intellectual achievement in Humboldt; and he paid his homage as well as he could. If the philosopher did not assert the value of his own leisure and quiet, how was anybody in a different position in life to understand it? Savans and philosophers understood it; but princes cannot. I know that when Humboldt came over in the King’s train, to the baptism of the Prince of Wales, the scientific and literary men who met him were concerned and humbled at the spectacle. That grand and noble head was out of place in a courtier train: the philosopher’s time was not his own, nor his freedom to go and come. He who was at the head of the realm of knowledge was discrowned in the presence of political royalty: his thoughts were subject to the beck and call of another; his will was not his own; and his ribbons and stars were but counterfeit decorations in his case. While the wise men of our nation pressed to see him, some of them wished he had not come, unless he could come alone, and to his own. What he himself was suffering from his bondage, these sympathising admirers were little aware. By the recent publication of his letters, we now know. “That dreary Potsdam!” he is incessantly complaining of, during and after his visits to the King. “My long and tedious visit to Potsdam,” he speaks of: “the perplexities of my desolate life:” “I am living monotonously and gloomily at Potsdam:” “a wild man of the woods whom they fancy they have tamed at Court.” Such are his groans. More expressly, he says to his friend, in a letter, “Under an appearance of outward splendour, and in the enjoyment of the somewhat fantastic preference of a high-minded prince, I live in a moral and mental isolation, such as can only be produced by the barren condition of the mind of this divided, erudite land;” and that friend notes in his diary, “Humboldt cheerful at Paris: at once melancholy on his return: overwhelmed with complaints and demands, and can do nothing.” The same diary records the “bitter scorn” with which Humboldt spoke of the personages and proceedings of the Court: “and yet his Court position must be held to save him from exile.” Once at least, at an earlier period, we find that “he thinks seriously of retiring,” and we wonder, as his friend did, why he did not retire, while he could still do so with safety as well as honour; but here is discovered to us a yet worse bondage. “The accumulation of business pressed on him, he said; and yet he was not prepared to forego it. Court and company were to him as a club, in which he was in the habit of spending his evenings and taking his glass.” Even this is not the worst. We have seen that the temper of the philosopher, naturally joyous and sanguine, and sure to be raised to a habit of more or less serenity by the congenial pursuit of a lofty kind of knowledge, had become capable of “bitter scorn.” His description of a coterie of princes, heirs to crowns, to whom he had been making his obeisances, is brutally sarcastic. Thus his temper went to ruin. There was something worse still. He lost his simplicity and sincerity—the virtue and grace which, beyond all others, naturally distinguish the eminent man of science in proportion to his eminence. As Humboldt’s scorn became more bitter, his flatteries became more gross. By consenting to a double life he ended with sacrificing the higher to the lower life, and bearing about a double mind. Here I may stop; for a more signal illustration of the liabilities of the courtier-philosopher is not on record.
The practical lesson seems to me short and clear.
It always gives me concern to hear literary and scientific men complaining of the absence of patronage and encouragement of science and letters in England; and, considering what we know, I am almost as much surprised as concerned. Few or none go so far as to desire any such attempts at intimacy between princes and philosophers, on the ground of royalty and philosophy; for such a thing could not at present happen in our Court: but we hear complaints that no royal hospitality is offered to literary men; and yet more frequently and strongly that office is not among the rewards of literary and scientific eminence. In France, we are told, savans and authors are, in virtue of their achievements, conspicuous in the legislature, in the peerage, and in office, whenever France is living under a representative system. Every country is glanced over, and all honours paid to authors and philosophers are cited in rebuke of the neglect with which such merits are treated at home.
I have no sympathy with all this; and not because I desire less honour for intellectual achievement, but more. To me it appears that the natural honours won from society are of a higher kind in all ways than any that can be arbitrarily bestowed. The great discoverer or author is so covered with honours, in the form of general homage, that no Sovereign can confer any that are not of an inferior kind. Title, office, Court intercourse are interruptions to a philosopher’s habit of life. He can gain nothing by them, while he cannot but lose much. As to giving political office to literary or scientific men, it is simply spoiling two good things by attempting to mix them forcibly together. Humboldt’s most adoring friends read his diplomatic despatches with a sort of dismay. “Who could have believed these were Humboldt’s?” they exclaimed. “They have no mark of his hand on them. They are neither better nor worse than any other man would have written:” and then they mourned to think how his proper work was standing still. So it would be with every author or savan who should be sent to parliament, or put into office, on the ground only of his science or letters. If he has peculiar political ability, it would have shown itself before; and its coexistence with his actual genius is improbable to the last degree. The only question is whether such rewards are natural. If they were seen to be otherwise, nobody would desire them. All the evidence we have tends to show that they are not natural; and that such gifts are, in fact, anything but rewards.
Are we then to conclude that nothing should or can be done in recognition of intellectual eminence and service? I am not of that opinion, quite. My feeling certainly is that the less we talk of “rewards” for that which is “its own exceeding