Empress : Kaiserin

Lieber Franz...

Thought I should celebrate Valentine’s Day in my own way on my blogs. Here’s a letter written by Franz Liszt to [whom-I-do-not-wish-to-name] in 1872 on 14 February (today’s date).

I can’t understand how I failed to send you a telegram last Thursday, 8 February—and am reproaching myself bitterly for this oversight. Certainly, my thoughts and my heart are constantly turned towards you, and all but overwhelmed with remembrance of you—but that even increases my faults of negligence. It would almost be better to love you less, and on certain days in the year to make myself a little more lovable! Having sincerely repented and made my confession, let me thank you for the gentleness of your reproach…
You accuse me of going to extremes—and of jumping from Proudhon to Saint Ignatius. As a matter of fact, most of the intermediary expedients have for me only a transitory value; in theory. I incline little to the clever manœuvres which conceal the goal. From time immemorial, the reconciling of liberty and authority has been the great social problem which the legislators, the philosophers, the dreamers, and the lunatics have sought to solve. The ancient Greeks held forth brilliantly on liberty—while the vast majority of the population was formed of slaves. St Ignatius, too, was convinced he ought to grant his disciples the greatest amount of liberty compatible with their salvation—and in America, classic ground of our modern liberties, slavery has been abolished only recently. People have conceived of the idea of freedom of property. All right; but isn’t it a bit like Montaigne’s 2-handed jug, which everyone pulls from his own side without caring about the jug itself, in the process often broken? For matters politicial, we arrive, if not at a perfect accord between authority and liberty, at least at a compromise sufficient for them to get along together—but in religion the problem is bristling with difficulties, and seems rather like squaring the circle. Since the divine element necessarily holds sway, it goes beyond outer submission to impose absolute faith, commonly called the faith of the charcoal burner—whose legend contains more wisdom than many big books. It relates that the devil disguised as a hermit entered a charcoal burner’s hut one day and, to tempt him, asked ‘What do you believe?’—‘I believe what the Holy Church believes.’—‘And what does the Holy Church believe?’—‘It believes what I believe.’…

Yep, the letter ends somewhat here. I understand it’s not very romantic, if you’re expecting some passionate connotations in context to Saint Valentine’s Day. There’s no such thing as Valentine’s Day in 19th century Germany, but this letter caught my attention – not only because of the date, but also because this is one of the more outstanding of Franz’s written correspondences.

posted by empress @ 4:51 PM