36 ALEXANDEK VON HUMBOLDT. 



society, as if all the elements of an important epoch were on 

 the point of dissolution. 



This state of things accounts for the disagreeable impres- 

 sion produced upon Greorge Forster by his visit to Berlin : ' I 

 reached Berlin,' writes Forster * to Jacobi on April 23, 1779, 

 6 at the close of January. I found I had greatly erred in my 

 conceptions of this great city. The exterior is much more 

 beautiful, the life within much more dark than I had pictured 

 it. Berlin is certainly one of the handsomest cities in Europe. 

 But the inhabitants ! Hospitality and the pleasures of refined 

 taste degenerated into luxury, high living, I might almost say 

 gluttony ; a bold and enlightened habit of thought perverted 

 into licentious extravagance and unbridled scepticism. And 

 then the rationalistic clergy, who, in their wisdom and out of 

 the fulness of their virtue and moral perfection, would sweep 

 from religion all that is incomprehensible, and reduce it to the 

 ordinary level of the human understanding! I expected to 

 find men of quite a superior order, pure, noble, and illuminated 

 with light from Heaven, yet with the simplicity and modesty 

 of children. I met, instead, with men of the ordinary type, 

 and, still worse, with men filled with the pride and self-conceit 

 of philosophers and theologians ; . . . . more I need not say. 

 As to the French Academicians ! let me shake off the dust 

 from my feet and pass on. ... In the five weeks that I was 

 there, I dined or supped in fifty or sixty different houses, 

 and each time I was obliged to listen to the same round of 

 dull stories, to hear and answer the same questions, to amuse, 

 in short, a thousand idle people, who, wishing to astound 

 their neighbours by the wonderful extent of their knowledge, 

 would put ten queries in a breath and recommence before 

 the first was answered, only that they might captivate the 

 weak and dull brains of the gaping listeners by the exu- 

 berance and rapid flow of their ideas, however foolish those 

 might be. This kind of thing has tormented me almost to 

 death, and Berlin swarms with people of this description. 

 .... Of the fair sex I dare not even think. Were women 

 ever entirely corrupt, they are so at Berlin, where self-love 

 that is to say, coquetry is as universal as in Paris, where th 



1 ' Sammtliche Schriften ' (Leipzig, 1843), vol. vii. p. 112. 



