You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Vienna, Thursday, 5 P.M.
November 15, 1883
My sweet princess
This is to be your name from now on. I have been thinking of you more than usual during these past days, and just want to
remind you-by wishing myself luck and success for the return of the date which gave you me-of the special coincidence that this is the seventeenth monthly memorial and that the seventeenth is again a Saturday. But I won't have to renew my courtship, will I? Today is a holiday1 and I have done no work whatsoever, in order to refresh myself. The weather is quite horrible; this evening I think I will go and see Hammerschlag.2 I am so weary that it will do me good if someone is friendly to me. What's more, they will ask after you and I will have a chance to talk about you.
What you said in your last letter about Mill3 and his wife should have inspired me on the spot to tell you something about them both. The essay by Brandes4 gives only a personal impression of the man, it is far from being an evaluation of his whole position in our contemporary history. I got the idea of reading him when Gomperz5 entrusted to me the translation of his last work. At the time I found fault with his lifeless style and the fact that in his work one could never find a sentence or a phrase that would remain in one's memory. But later on I read a philosophical work of his which was witty, epigrammatically apt, and lively. Very possibly he was the man of the century most capable of freeing himself from the domination of the usual prejudices. As a result-and this always goes hand in hand-he lacked the sense of the absurd, on several points, for instance in the emancipation of women and the question of women altogether. I remember that a main argument in the pamphlet I translated was that the married woman can earn as much as the husband. I dare say we agree that housekeeping and the care and education of children claim the whole person and practically rule out any profession; even if simplified conditions relieve the