RESIDENCE AT BERLIN TO THE REVOLUTION OF JULY. 89 



if not of his own accord at least without reluctance, after an 

 almost uninterrupted sojourn of eighteen years. It will be 

 well perhaps to bring into prominence the features which to one 

 of his character had rendered this sojourn so attractive. The 

 freedom, equality, and brotherly feeling that reigned even prior 

 to the Revolution among the men of talent in Paris, engendered, 

 in spite of the propensity to cabals and envious intrigues, a spirit 

 of mutual recognition, amounting even % to admiration, which 

 spread into a wider circle than the ordinary sphere of cultivated 

 society. By this more extended circle Humboldt was eagerly 

 welcomed, and found in it a congenial atmosphere to him almost 

 essential. To how low a stratum of Parisian society his fame, 

 to which he was never indifferent, had penetrated, may be 

 gathered from the following incident related by Holtei, who 

 visited the French capital in 1826 : ] ' Upon taking one's seat 

 in a hired conveyance and giving his address, the driver would 

 reply, while touching his hat : " Ah, chez Monsieur de Hum- 

 boldt ! " and from that moment he would view the stranger 

 with more interest, as one who was going to pay his respects to 

 the friend of the popular celebrities in Paris.' ' In Berlin,' adds 

 Holtei in 1844, 'I never encountered a cab-driver who was 

 acquainted with Humboldt's address.' 



This ignorance in the cab-drivers of Berlin may well be ex- 

 cused in a city which of all places in the world is the last in 

 which individual merit ever secures general appreciation or 

 enduring popularity. ' In Berlin,' Rahel used sarcastically to 

 remark, ' everything loses prestige and is pulled down to the 

 level of mediocrity, if not degraded to insignificance : were 

 his Holiness himself to come to Berlin, he would soon cease to 

 be Pope, and become something quite ordinary, perhaps a horse- 

 breaker.' Of Humboldt a resident in Berlin once remarked to 

 Varnhagen : ' Humboldt was a great man till he came to Berlin ; 

 he then ceased to be anything extraordinary.' 2 Humboldt 

 himself, who had imbibed from the French their enthusiastic 

 expression of admiration, although preserving something of the 

 local colouring of Berlin, comments in a spirit of bitterness 

 and well-aimed satire upon the propensity of that ' audacious 



1 Holtei, Vierzig Jahre/ vol. iii. p. 351. 



2 ' Briefe von A. von Humboldt an Varnhagen/ p. 88. 



