“In this he was too little mindful of the requirements of fair dealing; for he leaves any one who may take the trouble to turn to the ‘Indische Studien,’ and compare the version there given with that found among the ‘Chips,’ to infer that all the discordances he shall discover are attributable to Weber’s incorrectness, whereas they are in fact mainly alterations which Müller has made in his own reprint; and the real inaccuracies are perfectly trivial in character and few in number—such printer’s blunders as are rarely avoided by Germans who print English, or by English who print German. We should doubtless be doing Müller injustice if we maintained that he deliberately meant Weber to bear the odium of all the discrepancies which a comparer might find; but he is equally responsible for the result, if it is owing only to carelessness on his part.”
What will the intelligent gentlemen of the jury say to this? Because I complained of such blunders as altars being “construed,” instead of “constructed,” “enlightoned” instead of “enlightened,” “gratulate” instead of “congratulate,” and similar inaccuracies, occurring in an unauthorized reprint of my article, therefore I really wanted to throw the odium of what I had myself written in the original article, and what was, as far as the language was concerned, perfectly correct, on Professor Weber. Can forensic ingenuity go further? If America possesses many such powerful pleaders, we wonder how life can be secure.
Having thus ascertained whence illæ lacrumæ, I must now produce a small bottle at least of the tears themselves which Professor Whitney has shed over me, and over men far better than myself, all of which, he says, were never meant to be personal, and most of which have evidently been quite dried up in his memory.
I begin with Bopp. “Although his mode of working is wonderfully genial, his vision of great acuteness, and his instinct a generally trustworthy guide, he is liable to wander far from the safe track, and has done not a little labor over which a broad and heavy mantle of charity needs to be drawn” (I. 208).
M. Renan and myself have “committed the very serious error of inverting the mutual relation of dialectic variety and uniformity of speech, thus turning topsy-turvy the whole history of linguistic development. . . . . It may seem hardly worth while to spend any effort in refuting an opinion of which the falsity will have been made apparent by the exposition already given” (p. 177).
In another place (p. 284) M. Renan is told that his objection to the doctrine of a primitive Indo-European monosyllabism is noticed, not for any cogency which it possesses, but only on account of the respectability of M. Renan.
Lassen and Burnouf, who thought that the geographical reminiscences in the first chapter of the Vendidad had a historical foundation, are told that their “claim is baseless, and even preposterous” (p. 201). Yet what Professor Whitney’s knowledge of Zend must be, we may judge from what he says of Burnouf’s literary productions. “It is well known,” he says, “that the great French scholar produced two or three bulky volumes upon the Avesta.” I know of one bulky volume only, “Commentaire sur la Yaçna,” tome i., Paris, 1833, but that may be due to my lamentable ignorance.
“Professor Oppert simply exposes himself in the somewhat ridiculous attitude of one who knocks down, with gestures of awe and fright, a tremendous man of straw of his own erecting (I. 218). His erroneous assumptions will be received with most derisive incredulity (I. 221); the incoherence and aimlessness of his reasonings (I. 223); an ill-considered tirade, a tissue of misrepresentations of linguistic science (I. 237). He cannot impose upon us by his authority, nor attract us by his eloquence: his present essay is as heavy in style, as loose and vague in expression, unsound in argument, arrogant in tone” (I. 238). The motive imputed to Professor Oppert in writing his Essay is that “he is a Jew, and wanted to stand up for the Shemites.”
If Professor Oppert is put down as a Shemite, Dr. Bleek is sneered at as a German. “His work is written with much apparent profundity, one of a class, not quite unknown in Germany, in which a minimum of valuable truth is wrapped up in a maximum of sonating phraseology” (I. 292). Poor Germany catches it again on page 315. “Even, or especially in Germany,” we are told, “many an able and acute scholar seems minded to indemnify himself for dry and tedious grubbings among the roots and forms of Comparative Philology by the most airy ventures in the way of constructing Spanish castles of linguistic science.”
In his last work Professor Whitney takes credit for having at last rescued the Science of Language from the incongruities and absurdities of European scholars.