F. Max Müller

“ How often was I in perfect despair, because there was some allusion in Sâyana which I could not make out, and which no other Sanskrit scholar, not even Burnouf or Wilson, could help me to clear up. It often took me whole days, nay, weeks, before I saw light. A good deal of the commentary was easy enough. It was like marching on the high road, when suddenly there rises a fortress that has to be taken before any further advance is to be thought of. In the purely mechanical part other men could and did help me. ”

“ If the azure hue is inseparable from distant mountains and from the distant sky, we need not wonder that it veils the distant paradise of youth. A man who keeps a diary from his earliest years, and who as an old man simply copies from its yellow pages, may give us a very accurate black and white image of what he saw as a boy, but as in old faded photographs, the life and light are gone out of them, while unassisted memory may often preserve tints of their former reality. There is life and light in such recollections, but I am willing to admit that memory can be very treacherous also. ”

“ Let those who love to fight, fight; but let others who are fond of quiet work go on undisturbed in their own special callings. That was, as far as we can see, the old Indian idea, or at all events the ideal which the Brahmans wished to see realized. I do not stand up for utter idleness or sloth, not even for drones, though nature does not seem to condemn even hoc genus altogether. All I plead for, as a scholar and a thinker, is freedom from canvassing, from letter-reading and letter-writing, from committees, deputations, meetings, public dinners, and all the rest. ”

“ Did not Emerson write, “The scholar is the man of the age”? Did not even Mazzini, who certainly was constantly up and trying to do, did not even he confess that men must die, but that the amount of truth they have discovered does not die with them? And Carlyle? Did he ever try to get into Parliament? Did he ever accept directorates? Did he join either the Chartists or the Special Constables in Trafalgar Square? As in a concert you want listeners as well as performers, so in public life, those who look on are quite as essential as those who shout and deal heavy blows. ”

“ No sensible man ought to care about posthumous praise or posthumous blame. Enough for the day is the evil thereof. Our contemporaries are our right judges, our peers have to give their votes in the great academies and learned societies, and if they on the whole are not dissatisfied with the little we have done, often under far greater difficulties than the world was aware of, why should we care for the distant future? Who was a greater giant in philosophy than Hegel? Who towered higher than Darwin in natural science? ”

“ In an autobiography written by an old man there is therefore a double danger, first the indulgence of the old man, and secondly the kindly feeling of the writer towards the object of his remarks.
All these difficulties stand before me like a mountain wall. And it seems better to confess at once that an old man writing his own life can never be quite just, however honest he tries to be. He may be too indulgent, but he may also be too strict and stern. To say, for instance, of a man that he has not kept his promise, would be a very serious charge if brought against anybody else. ”

“ For after all, it is not simply in order to learn two languages that we devote so large a share of our time to the study of Greek and Latin; it is in order to learn to understand the old world on which our modern world is founded; it is in order to think [104] the old thoughts, which are the feeders of our own intellectual life, that we become in our youth the pupils of Greeks and Romans. In order to know what we are, we have to learn how we have come to be what we are. ”

“ Even a quiet scholar, if he keeps his eyes open, may now and then see something that is of importance to the historian. While I was living in small rooms at Leipzig, or lodging au cinquième in the Rue Royale at Paris, or copying manuscripts in a dark room of the old East India House in Leadenhall Street, I now and then caught glimpses of the mighty stream of history as it was rushing by. ”

“ If the people of the Veda did not turn out to be quite such savages as was hoped and expected, they nevertheless disclosed to us a layer of thought which can be explored nowhere else. The Vedic poets were not ashamed of exposing their fear that the sun might tumble down from the sky, and there are no other poets, as far as I know, who still trembled at the same not quite unnatural thought. Nor do I find even savages who still wonder and express their surprise that black cows should produce white milk. Is not that childish enough for any ancient or modern savage? ”

“ For the present, I can only repeat the conclusion I arrived at after weighing all the arguments of my friends and critics, namely, to continue my Recollections much as I began them, to try to explain what made me what I am, to describe, in fact, my environment; though as my years advance, and my labours and plans grow wider and wider, I shall, no doubt, have to say a great deal more about myself than in the volumes of Auld Lang Syne. In fact, my Recollections will become more and more of an autobiography, and the I and the Autos will appear more frequently than I could have wished. ”

“ Arguing when reason meets reason is most delightful, whether we win or lose; but arguing against unreason, against anything that is by nature thick, dense, impenetrable, irrational, has always seemed to me the most disheartening occupation. Majorities, mere numerical majorities, by which the world is governed now, strike me [311] as mere brute force, though to argue against them is no doubt as foolish as arguing against a railway train that is going to crush you. Gladstone could harangue multitudes; so could Disraeli; all honour to them for it. But think of Carlyle or Ruskin doing so! ”

“ At that time Herbart’s philosophy, as taught by Drobisch at Leipzig, came to me as a most useful antidote. The chief object of that philosophy is, as is well known, the analysing and clearing, so to speak, of our concepts. This was exactly what I wanted, only that occupied as I was with the problems of language, I at once translated the object of his philosophy into a definition of words. ”

“ It is true, no doubt, that in their first enthusiasm the students of Sanskrit had uttered many exaggerated opinions. Sanskrit was represented as the mother of all languages, instead of being the elder sister of the Aryan family. The beginning of all language, of all thought, of all religion was traced back to India, and when Greek scholars were told that Zeus existed in the Veda under the name of Dyaus, there was a great flutter in the dovecots of classical scholarship. ”

“ I could not deny that, historically speaking, we knew very little of the life, the work, and the teachings of Christ; but for that very reason I doubted our being justified in giving our interpretation and reconstruction to the fragments left to us of the real history of the life and teaching of Christ. To this opinion I remained true through life. I claimed for each man the liberty of believing in his own Christ, but I objected to Renan’s idyllic Christ as I objected to Niebuhr’s filling the canvas of ancient Roman history with the figures of his own imagination. ”

“ I had to learn what was, perhaps, the most difficult lesson of all, that a trusted friend could not always be trusted, and yet need not therefore be altogether a reprobate. What was most difficult for me to digest was an untruth: finding out that one who professed to be a friend had said and done most unfriendly things behind one’s back. Still, in a long life one finds out that even that may not be a deadly sin, and that if we are so loth to forgive it, it is partly because the falsehood affected our own interests. ”

“ There is hardly a word that has so many meanings as Idea, and I doubt whether any of the raw recruits, just escaped from school, and unacquainted with the history of philosophy, could have had any idea of what Hegel’s Idea was meant for. Yet they talked about it very eloquently and very positively over their glasses of beer; and anybody who came from Berlin and could speak mysteriously or rapturously about the Idea and its evolution by the dialectic process, was listened to with silent wonder by the young Saxons, who had been brought up on Kant and Krug. ”

“ But the real harm begins when people imagine that in studying the ways of infants they can discover what man was like in his original condition, whether as a hairy or a hairless creature. To imagine that we can learn from the way in which children begin to use our old words, how the primitive language of mankind was formed, seems to me like imagining that children playing with counters would teach us how and for what purpose the first money was coined. ”

“ If my remarks refer to the study and practice of medicine I am asked whether more men are killed in England than in Germany; if I refer to the study and practice of law I am assured that quite as many murderers are hanged in England as in Germany; and if I venture to hint that the study of theology might on certain points be improved at Oxford, I am told that quite as many souls are saved in England as in Germany, nay, a good many more. ”

“ Everybody knew that he was watched, and gossip, in the best sense of the word, ruled supreme in the little town. Gossip was, in fact, public opinion with all its good and all its bad features. Still the result was that no one could afford to lose caste, and that everybody behaved as well as he could. I really believe that the private life of the people of Dessau at the beginning of the century was blameless. The great evils of society did not exist, and if now and then there was a black sheep, his or her life became a burden to them. ”

“ When at last a professorship of Modern Literature was offered me at Oxford, I made up my mind, though it was not exactly what I should have liked, to give up half of my time to studies required by this professorship, keeping half of my time for the Veda and for Sanskrit in general. This was not so bad after all. People often laughed at me for being professor of the most modern languages, and giving so much of my time and labour to the most ancient language and literature in the world. ”

“ Now it is quite true that the life of a quiet scholar has little to do with history, except it may be the history of his own branch of study, which some people consider quite unimportant, while to others it seems all-important. This is as it ought to be, till the universal historian finds the right perspective, and assigns to each branch of study and activity its proper place in the panorama of the progress of mankind towards its ideals. ”

“ If a man possesses this one pearl of great price, he may save himself and his treasure, but neither the tinselled vestments of a Cardinal, nor the triple tiara that crowns the Head of the Church, will serve as life-belts in the gales of doubt and controversy. My friends at Oxford did not know that, though with my one jewel I seemed outwardly poor, I was really richer and safer than many a Cardinal and many a Doctor of Divinity. ”

“ And here at Oxford I was told that the Government did not know Oxford, nor Oxford the Government, that the only ruling power consisted in the Statutes of the University, that professors and tutors were perfectly free so long as they conformed to these statutes, and that certainly no minister could ever appoint or dismiss a professor, except the Regius professors. “If we want a thing done,” my friends used to explain to me, “we do it ourselves, as long as it does not run counter to the statutes.”
But Oxford changes with every generation. ”

“ I must ease my conscience once for all on this point, and say what I feel about atavism and environment. Environment in the shape of friends, of locality, and other material circumstances, has certainly influenced my life very much, and I could never see why such a hybrid word as environment should be used instead of surroundings or circumstances. Creatures of circumstances would be far better understood than creatures of environment; but environment, I suppose, would sound more scientific. ”

“ We can trace the most modern forms of language back to Sanskrit, or rather to that postulated linguistic stratum of which Sanskrit formed the most prominent representative, just as we can trace the French Dieu back to Latin Deus and Sanskrit Devas, the brilliant beings behind the phenomena of nature; and again behind them, Dyaus, the brilliant sky, the Greek Zeus, the Roman Iovis and Iuppiter, [198] the most natural of all the Aryan gods of nature. This is real evolution, a real causal nexus between the present and the past. ”

“ As the spires of a city—of Oxford for instance—arrange themselves differently as we pass the old place on the railway, so that now one and now the other stands in the centre and seems to rise above the heads of the rest, so it is with our friends and acquaintances. Some who seemed giants at one time assume smaller proportions as others come into view towering above them. ”

“ In Germany it was formerly not an uncommon thing for the author of a book to write a self-review (Selbst-Kritik) , and these were generally far better than reviews written by friends or enemies. For who knows the strong and weak points of a book so well as the author? True; but a whole life is more difficult to review and to criticize than a single book. Nevertheless it must be admitted that an autobiography has many advantages, and it might be well if every man of note, nay, every man who has something to say for himself that he wishes posterity to know, should say it himself. ”