None the less, in Professor Tiele’s opinion, our method is new (or is not new), illuminating, successful, and alone successful, for the ends to which we apply it, and, finally, we have shown Mr. Max Müller’s method to be a house builded on the sand. That is the gist of what Professor Tiele said.
Mr. Max Müller, like myself, quotes part and omits part. He quotes twice Professor Tiele’s observations on my deplorable habit of gliding over important questions. He twice says that we have ‘actually’ claimed the Professor as ‘an ally of the victorious army,’ ‘the ethnological students of custom and myth,’ and once adds, ‘but he strongly declined that honour.’ He twice quotes the famous braves gens passage, excepting only M. Gaidoz, as a scholar, from a censure explicitly directed at our possible camp-followers as distinguished from ourselves.
But if Mr. Max Müller quotes Professor Tiele’s remarks proving that, in his opinion, the ‘army’ is really victorious; if he cites the acquiescence in my opinion that his mythological house is ‘builded on the sands,’ or Professor Tiele’s preference for our method over his own, or Professor Tiele’s volunteered remark that he is ‘much more our ally than our adversary,’ I have not detected the passages in Contributions to the Science of Mythology.
The reader may decide as to the relative importance of what I left out, and of what Mr. Max Müller omitted. He says, ‘Professor Tiele and I differ on several points, but we perfectly understand each other, and when we have made a mistake we readily confess and correct it’ (i. 37).
The two scholars, I thought, differed greatly. Mr. Max Müller’s war-cry, slogan, mot d’ordre, is to Professor Tiele ‘a false hypothesis.’ Our method, which Mr. Max Müller combats so bravely, is all that Professor Tiele has said of it. But, if all this is not conspicuously apparent in our adversary’s book, it does not become me to throw the first stone. We are all, in fact, inclined unconsciously to overlook what makes against our argument. I have done it; and, to the best of my belief, Mr. Max Müller has not avoided the same error.
MANNHARDT
Mannhardt’s Attitude
Professor Tiele, it may appear, really ‘fights for his own hand,’ and is not a thorough partisan of either side. The celebrated Mannhardt, too, doubtless the most original student of folk-lore since Grimm, might, at different periods of his career, have been reckoned an ally, now by philologists, now by ‘the new school.’ He may be said, in fact, to have combined what is best in the methods of both parties. Both are anxious to secure such support as his works can lend.
Moral Character Impeached
Mr. Max Müller avers that his moral character seems to be ‘aimed at’ by critics who say that he has no right to quote Mannhardt or Oldenberg as his supporters (1. xvi.). Now, without making absurd imputations, I do not reckon Mannhardt a thorough partisan of Mr. Max Müller. I could not put our theory so well as Mannhardt puts it. ‘The study of the lower races is an invaluable instrument for the interpretation of the survivals from earlier stages, which we meet in the full civilisation of cultivated peoples, but which arose in the remotest fetishism and savagery.’