As this letter does not enter into the history of Niebuhr’s later studies, I inquired of his friend, the Chevalier Bunsen, whether he had continued to cultivate the faculty thus early developed. I received from him the following interesting statement:—“Niebuhr,” he says, “ought not to be ranked among Linguists, in contradistinction with Philologers. Language had no special interest for him, beyond what it affords in connection with history and literature. His proficiency in languages was, however, very great, in consequence of his early and constant application to history, and his matchless memory. I have spoken of both in my Memoir on Niebuhr, in the German and English edition of Niebuhr’s Letters and Life; it is appended to the 2nd volume of both editions. I think it is somewhere stated how many languages he knew at an early age. What I know is, that besides Greek and Latin, he learned early to read and write Arabic; Hebrew he had also learned, but neglected afterwards; Russian and Slavonic he learned (to read only,) in the years 1808, 1810. He wrote well English, French, and Italian; and read Spanish, and Portuguese. Danish he wrote as well as his mother tongue, German, and he understood Swedish. In short, he would learn with the greatest ease any language which led him to the knowledge of historical truth, when occupied with the subject; but language, as such, had no charm for him.”
Among the scholars who assisted Adelung and Vater in the compilation of the Mithridates, by far the most distinguished was the illustrious Charles William von Humboldt. He was born at Potsdam, in 1767, and received his preliminary education at Berlin. His university studies were made partly at Göttingen, partly at Jena, where he formed the acquaintance and friendship of Goethe, Schiller, Wieland, and, above all, of Herder, from whose well-known tastes it is highly probable that Humboldt’s mind received the strong philological bias which it exhibited during his life. Unlike most of the scholars who preceded him in this career, however, Humboldt’s life was spent amid the bustle and intrigue of diplomatical pursuits. He was sent to Rome as Prussian Minister in 1802, and, from that period until 1819, he was almost uniformly employed in this and similar public services. From his return to Berlin, in 1819, he lived almost entirely for science, till his death, which occurred at Tegel, near Berlin, in 1835. Humboldt is, in truth, the author of that portion of the third volume of the Mithridates which treats of the languages of the two continents of America; and, although a great part of its materials were derived from the labours of others—from the memoirs, published and unpublished, of the missionaries, from the works and MSS. of Padre Hervaz, and other similar sources—yet no one can read any single article in the volume without perceiving that Humboldt had made himself thoroughly master of the subject; and that, especially in its bearings upon the general science of philology, or the great question of the unity of languages and its kindred ethnological problems, he had not only exhausted all the learning of his predecessors, but had successfully applied to it all the powers of his own comprehensive and original genius. To the consideration, too, of this numerous family of languages he brought a mind stored with the knowledge of all the other great families both of the East and of the West; and although it is not easy to say what his success in speaking languages may have been, it is impossible to doubt either the variety or the solidity of his attainments both as a scientific and as a practical linguist. But Humboldt’s place with posterity must be that of a philologer rather than of a linguist. His Essay on the “Diversity of the Formation of Human Language, and its Influence on the Intellectual Development of Mankind,” published posthumously in 1836, as an Introduction to his Analysis of the Kawi Language, is a work of extraordinary learning and research, as well as of profound and original thought; analysing all the successive varieties of grammatical structure which characterize the several classes of language in their various stages of structural development, from the naked simplicity of Chinese up to the minute and elaborate inflexional variety of the Sanscritic family. M. Bunsen describes this wonderful work as “the Calculus Sublimis of linguistic theory,” and declares that “it places William von Humboldt’s name by the side of that of Leibnitz in universal comparative ethnological philology.”[153]
The school of Humboldt in Germany has supplied a long series of distinguished names to philological literature, beginning with Frederic von Schlegel, (whose Essay “On the Language and Literature of the Hindoos, 1808,” opened an entirely new view of the science of comparative philology), and continued, through Schlegel’s brother Augustus, Rask, Bopp, Grimm, Lepsius, Pott, Pfizmaier, Hammer-Purgstall (the so-called “Lily of Ten Tongues”), Sauerwein, Diez, Boehtlingk, and the lamented Castrén, down to Bunsen, and his learned fellow-labourers, Max Müller, Paul Boetticher, Aufrecht, and others.[154] For most of those, as for Schlegel, the Sanscrit family of languages has been the great centre of exploration, or at least the chief standard of comparison; and Bopp, in his wonderful work, the “Comparative Grammar of the Sanscrit, Zend, Greek, Latin, Lithuanian, old Slavonic, Gothic, and German Languages,”[155] has almost exhausted this part of the inquiry. Others (still, however, with the same general view) have devoted themselves to other families, as Lepsius to the Egyptian, Rask to the Scythian, Boehtlingk to the Tartar,[156] Grimm to the Teutonic, Diez to the Romanic, and Castrén to the Finnic. Others, in fine, as Bunsen in his most comprehensive work, “Outlines of the Philosophy of Universal History applied to Language,” (the third volume of his “Christianity and Mankind”) have digested the entire subject, and applied the researches of all to the solution of the great problem of the science. Some of those whom I have named rather resembled the ancient heroes of romance and adventure, than the common race of quiet everyday scholars. The journeys of Rask, Klaproth, and Lepsius, were not only full of danger, but often attended with exceeding privation; and Alexander Castrén of Helsingfors was literally a martyr of the science. This enthusiastic student,[157] although a man of extremely delicate constitution, “left his study, travelled for years alone in his sledge through the snowy deserts of Siberia; coasted along the borders of the Polar Sea; lived for whole winters in caves of ice, or in the smoky huts of greasy Samoiedes; then braved the sand-clouds of Mongolia; passed the Baikal; and returned from the frontiers of China to his duties as Professor at Helsingfors, to die after he had given to the world but a few specimens of his treasures.”[158]
Rask and M. Bunsen, even as linguists, deserve to be more specially commemorated.
The former, who was born in 1787 at Brennekilde, in the island of Funen, traversed, in the course of the adventurous journey already alluded to, the Eastern provinces of Russia, Persia, India, Malacca, and the island of Ceylon, and penetrated into the interior of Africa. In all the countries which he visited he made himself acquainted with the various languages which prevailed; so that besides the many languages of his native Teutonic family, those of the Scandinavian, Finnic, and Sclavonic stock, the principal cultivated European languages, and the learned languages (including those of the Bible), he was also familiar with Sanscrit in all its branches; and is justly described as the first who opened the way to “a real grammatical knowledge of Zend.”[159] M. Bunsen’s great work exhibits a knowledge of the structural analysis of a prodigious number of languages, from almost every family. As a master of the learned languages, Hebrew, Greek, Syriac, and (though he has cultivated these less), Arabic and Persian, he has few superiors. He speaks and writes with equal facility Latin, German, English, French, and Italian, all with singular elegance and purify; he speaks besides Dutch and Danish; he reads Swedish, Icelandic, and the other old German languages, Spanish, Portuguese, and Romaic; and he has also studied many of the less known languages, as Chinese, Basque, Finnic, and Welsh, together with several of the African and North American languages, but chiefly with a view to their grammatical structure, and without any idea of learning to read them.
Nevertheless, with all the linguistic learning which they undoubtedly possess, neither Humboldt nor the other members of his distinguished school fall properly within the scope of this Memoir. With all of them, even those who were themselves accomplished linguists, the knowledge of languages, (and especially of their vocabularies), is a subordinate object. They have never proposed the study to themselves, for its own sake, but only as an instrument of philosophical inquiry. It might almost be said, indeed, that by the reaction which this school has created against the old system of etymological, and in favour of the structural, comparison of languages, a positive discouragement has been given to the exact or extensive study of their vocabularies. Philologers, as a class, have a decided disposition to look down upon, and even to depreciate, the pursuit of linguists. With the former, the knowledge of the words of a language is a very minor consideration in comparison with its inflexions, and still more its laws of transposition (Lautverschiebung); Professor Schott of Berlin plainly avows that “a limited knowledge of languages is sufficient for settling the general questions as to their common origin;”[160] and beyond a catalogue of a certain number of words for the purpose of a comparative vocabulary, there is a manifest tendency on the part of many, to regard all further concern about the words of a language as old-fashioned and puerile. It it some consolation to the admirers of the old school to know, that, from time to time, learned philologers have been roughly taken to task for the presumption with which they have theorized about languages of whose vocabulary they are ignorant; and it is difficult not to regard the unsparing and often very amusing exposures of Professor Schott’s blunders which occur in the long controversy that he has had with Boehtlingk, Mr. Caldwell’s recent strictures[161] upon the Indian learning of Professor Max Müller, or Stanislaus Julien’s still fiercer onslaught on M. Panthier, in the Journal Asiatique,[162] as a sort of retributive offering to the offended Genius of neglected Etymology.
I shall not delay upon the Biblical linguists of Germany as Hug, Jahn, Schott, Windischmann, Vullers, &c., among Catholics, or the rival schools of Rosenmüller, Tholuck, Ewald, Gesenius, Fürst, Beer, De Lagarde, &c. Extensive[163] as is the range of the attainments of these distinguished men in the languages of the Bible, and their literature, this accomplishment has now become so universal among German Biblical scholars, that it has almost ceased to be regarded as a title to distinction. Its very masters are lost in the crowd of eminent men who have grown up on all sides around him.
Among the scholars of modern Hungary there are a few names which deserve to be mentioned. Sajnovitz’s work on the common origin of the Magyar and Lapp languages, though written in 1770, long before the science of Comparative Philology had been reduced to its present form, has obtained the praise of much learning and ingenuity. Gyarmathi, who wrote somewhat later on the affinity of the Magyar and Finnic languages (1799) is admitted by M. Bunsen[164] to “deserve a very high rank among the founders of that science.” But neither of these authors can be considered as a linguist. Father Dubrowsky, of whom I shall speak elsewhere, although born in Hungary, cannot properly be considered as a Hungarian. Kazinczy, Kisfaludy, and their followers, have confined themselves almost entirely to the cultivation of their own native language, or at least to the ethnological affinities which it involves.
I have only discovered one linguist of modern Hungary whom I can consider entitled to a special notice, but the singular and almost mysterious interest which attaches to his name may in some measure compensate for the comparative solitude in which it is found.