Auld lang syne

by F. Max Müller

J. R. Lowell.

24th June, 1886.

I lost the pleasure of shaking hands with Longfellow during his stay in England. Though I have been more of a fixture at Oxford than most professors, I was away during the vacation when he paid his visit to our University, and thus lost seeing a poet to whom I felt strongly attracted, not only by the general spirit of his poetry, which was steeped in German thought, but as the translator of several of my father’s poems.

I was more fortunate with Dr. Wendell Holmes. His arrival in England had been proclaimed beforehand, and one naturally remained at home in order to be allowed to receive him. His hundred days in England were one uninterrupted triumphal progress. When he arrived at Liverpool he found about three hundred invitations waiting for him. Though he was accompanied by a most active and efficient daughter, he had at once to engage a secretary to answer this deluge of letters. And though he was past eighty, he never spared himself, and was always ready to see and to be seen. He was not only an old, but a ripe and mellow man.

There was no subject on which one could touch which was not familiar to the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table. His thoughts and his words were ready, and one felt that it was not for the first time that the subject had been carefully thought out and talked out by him. That he should have been able to stand all the fatigue of his journey and the constant claims on his ready wit seemed to me marvellous. I had the pleasure of showing him the old buildings of Oxford. He seemed to know them all, and had something to ask and to say about every one.

When we came to Magdalen College, he wanted to see and to measure the elms. He was very proud of some elms in America, and he had actually brought some string with which he had measured the largest tree he knew in his own country. He proceeded to measure one of our finest elms in Magdalen College, and when he found that it was larger than his American giant, he stood before it admiring it, without a single word of envy or disappointment.

I had, however, a great fright while he was staying at our house. He had evidently done too much, and after our first dinner party he had feverish shivering fits, and the doctor whom I sent for declared at once that he must keep perfectly quiet in bed, and attend no more parties of any kind. This was a great disappointment to myself and to many of my friends. But at his time of life the doctor’s warning could not be disregarded, and I had, at all events, the satisfaction of sending him off to Cambridge safe and sound. I had him several days quite to myself, and there were few subjects which we did not discuss. We mostly agreed, but even where we did not, it was a real pleasure to differ from him. We discussed the greatest and the smallest questions, and on every one he had some wise and telling remarks to pour out. I remember one long conversation while we were sitting in an old wainscoted room at All Souls’, ornamented with the arms of former fellows. It had been at first the library of the college, then one of the fellows’ rooms, and lastly a lecture-room. We were deep in the old question of the true relation between the Divine and the Human in man, and here again, as on all other questions, everything seemed to be clear and evident to his mind. Perhaps I ought not to repeat what he said to me when we parted: “I have had much talk with people in England; with you I have had a real conversation.” We understood each other, and wondered how it was that men so often misunderstood one another. I told him that it was the badness of our language, he thought it was the badness of our tempers. Perhaps we were both right. With him again good-bye was good-bye for life, and at such moments one wonders indeed how kindred souls became separated, and one feels startled and repelled at the thought that, such as they were on earth, they can never meet again. And yet there is continuity in the world, there is no flaw, no break anywhere, and what has been will surely be again, though how it will be we cannot know, and if only we trust in the Wisdom that pervades and overshadows the whole Universe, we need not know.

Were I to write down my more or less casual meetings with men of literary eminence, I should have much more to say, much that was of deep interest and value to myself, but would hardly be of interest to others. I felt greatly flattered, for instance, when years ago Macaulay invited me to see him at the Albany, and to discuss with him the new regulations for the Indian Civil Service. This must have been in about 1854. I was quite a young and unknown man at the time, but I had already made his acquaintance at Bunsen’s house, where he had been asked to meet Herr von Radowitz, for a short time Prime Minister in Prussia, and the most famous talker in Germany. It was indeed a tournament to watch, but as it was in English, which Radowitz spoke well, yet not well enough for such a contest, Macaulay carried the day, though Radowitz excelled in repartee, in anecdotes, and in a certain elegance more telling in French than in English.

I went to call on Macaulay in London, well provided as I thought with facts and arguments in support of the necessity of Oriental studies, which I knew he had always discouraged, in the preparation and examination of candidates for the Indian Civil Service. He began by telling me that he knew nothing of Indian languages and literature, and that he wanted to know all I had to say on the real advantages to be derived by young civilians from a study of Sanskrit. I had already published several letters in The Times on the subject, and had carried on a long controversy with Sir Charles Trevelyan, afterwards published in a pamphlet, entitled “Correspondence relating to the Establishment of an Oriental College in London.”

Macaulay, after sitting down, asked me a number of questions, but before I had time to answer any one of them, he began to relate his own experiences in India, dilating on the difference between a scholar and a man of business, giving a full account of his controversy, while in India, with men like Professor Wilson and others, who maintained that English would never become the language of India, expressing his own strong conviction to the contrary, and relating a number of anecdotes, showing that the natives learnt English far more easily than the English could ever learn Hindustani or Sanskrit. Then he branched off into some disparaging remarks about Sanskrit literature, particularly about their legal literature, entering minutely into the question of what authority could be assigned to the Laws of Manu, and of what possible use they could be in determining lawsuits between natives, ending up with the usual diatribes about the untruthfulness of the natives of India, and their untrustworthiness as witnesses in a court of law.