Now on page 119 Professor Whitney very properly reproves another scholar, Professor Goldstücker, for having laughed at the German school of Vedic interpretation. “He emphasizes it,” he says, “dwells upon it, reiterates it three or four times in a paragraph, as if there lay in the words themselves some potent argument. Any uninformed person would say, we are confident, that he was making an unworthy appeal to English prejudice against foreign men and foreign ways.” Professor Whitney finishes up with charging Professor Goldstücker, who was himself a German—I beg my reader’s pardon, but I am only quoting from a North American Review—with “fouling his own nest.” Professor Whitney, I believe, studied in a German university. Did he never hear of a ’cute little bird, who does to the nest in which he was reared, what he says Professor Goldstücker did to his own?
Χαῖρέ μοι, ὠ Γώλδστυκρε, καὶ εἰν Ἀΐδαο δόμοισιν·
Πάντα γὰρ ἤδη τοι τελέω, τὰ πάροιθεν ὑπέστην.
Haeckel is called a headlong Darwinian (I. 293), Schleicher is infected with Darwinism (I. 294), “he represents a false and hurtful tendency (I. 298), he is blind to the plainest truths, and employs a mode of reasoning in which there is neither logic nor common sense (I. 323). His essays are unsound, illogical, untrue; but there are still incautious sciolists by whom every error that has a great name attached to it is liable to be received as pure truth, and who are ever specially attracted by good hearty paradoxes” (I. 330).
I add a few more references to the epitheta ornantia which I was charged with having invented. “Utter futility” (p. 36); “meaningless and futile” (p. 152); “headlong materialist” (p. 153); “better humble and true (Whitney) than high-flown, pretentious, and false” (not-Whitney, p. 434); “simply and solely nonsense” (I. 255); “darkening of counsel by words without knowledge” (I. 255); “rhetorical talk” (I. 723); “flourish of trumpets, lamentable (not to say) ridiculous failure” (I. 277).
What a contrast between the rattling discharges of these mitrailleuses at the beginning of the war, and the whining and whimpering assurance now made by the American professor, that he never in his life said anything personal or offensive!
WHY I OUGHT NOT TO HAVE ANSWERED.
Having taken the trouble of collecting these spent balls from the various battlefields of the American general, I hope that even Professor Whitney will no longer charge me with having spoken without book. As long as he cited me before the tribunal of scholars only, I should have considered it an insult to them to suppose that they could not, if they liked, form their own judgment. For fifteen years have I kept my fire, till, like a Chinese juggler, Professor Whitney must have imagined he had nearly finished my outline on the wall with the knives so skillfully aimed to miss me. But when he dragged me before a tribunal where my name was hardly known, when he thought that by catching the aura popularis of Darwinism, he could discredit me in the eyes of the leaders of that powerful army, when he actually got possession of the pen of the son, fondly trusting it would carry with it the weight of the father, then I thought I owed it to myself, and to the cause of truth and its progress, to meet his reckless charges by clear rebutting evidence. I did this in my “Answer to Mr. Darwin,” and as I did it, I did it thoroughly, leaving no single charge unanswered, however trifling. At the same time, while showing the unreasonableness of his denunciations, I could not help pointing out some serious errors into which Professor Whitney had fallen. Some thrusts can only be parried by a-tempo thrusts.
Professor Whitney, like an experienced advocate, passes over in silence the most serious faults which I had pointed out in his “Lectures,” and after he has attempted—with what success, let others judge—to clear himself from a few, he turns round, and thinks it best once for all to deny my competency to judge him. And why?
“I do not consider Professor Müller capable of judging me justly,” he says. And why? “Because I have felt moved, on account of his extraordinary popularity and the exceptional importance attached to his utterances, to criticise him more frequently than anybody else.”