For all this, however, I met with but small sympathy and encouragement at Leipzig; nay, I had to be very careful in uttering what were supposed to be heretical or unscholarlike opinions in the seminary of Gottfried Hermann, or in the Latin society of Haupt. The latter particularly, though he knew very well how much light had been spread on the growth of language by the researches of Bopp, Grimm, and Pott, and though Grimm was his intimate friend of whom he always spoke with real veneration, could not bear his own pupils dabbling in this subject. And of course at that time my knowledge of comparative philology was a mere dabbling. If he could discover a false quantity in any etymology, great was his delight, and his sarcasm truly withering, particularly as it was poured out in very classical Latin. Gottfried Hermann was a different character. He saw there was a new light and he would not turn his back to it. He knew how lightly his antagonist, Otfried Müller, valued Sanskrit in his mythological essays, and he set to work, and in one of his last academical programs actually gave the paradigms of Sanskrit verbs as compared with those of Greek. He saw that the coincidences between the two could not be casual, and if they were so overwhelming in the mere termination of verbs, what might we not expect in words and names, even in mythological names? He by no means discouraged me, nay, he was sorry to lose me, when in my third year I went to Berlin. He showed me great kindness on several occasions, and when the time came to take my degree of M.A. and Ph.D., he, as Dean of the Faculty, invited me to return to Leipzig, offering me an exhibition to cover the expenses of the Degree.
F. MAX MÜLLER
Aged Twenty
My wish to go to Berlin arose partly from a desire to hear Bopp, but yet more from a desire to make the acquaintance of Schelling. My inclination towards philosophy had become stronger and stronger; I had my own ideas about the mythological as a necessary form of ancient philosophy, and when I saw that the old philosopher had advertised his lectures or lecture on mythology, I could not resist, and went to Berlin in 1844. I must say at once that Professor Bopp, though he was extremely kind to me, was at that time, if not old—he was only fifty-three—very infirm. In his lectures he simply read his Comparative Grammar with a magnifying glass, and added very little that was new. He lent me some manuscripts which he had copied in Latin in his younger days, but I could not get much help from him when I came to really difficult passages. This, I confess, puzzled me at the time, for I looked on every professor as omniscient. The time comes, however, when we learn that even at fifty-three a man may have forgotten certain things, nay, may have let many books and new discoveries even in his own subject pass by, because he has plenty to do with his own particular studies. We remember the old story of the professor who, when charged by a young and rather impertinent student with not knowing this or that, replied: “Sir, I have forgotten more than you ever knew.” And so it is indeed. Human nature and human memory are very strong during youth and manhood, but even at fifty there is with many people a certain decline of mental vigour that tells chiefly on the memory. Things are not exactly forgotten, but they do not turn up at the right time. They just leave a certain knowledge of where the missing information can be found; they leave also a kind of feeling that the ground is not quite safe and that we must no longer trust entirely to our memory. In one respect this feeling is very useful, for instead of writing down anything, trusting to our memory as we used to do, we feel it necessary to verify many things which formerly were perfectly clear and certain in our memory without such reference to books.
I remember being struck with the same thing in the case of Professor Wilson, the well-known Oxford Professor of Sanskrit. He was kind enough to read with me, and I certainly was often puzzled, not only by what he knew, but also by what he had forgotten. I feel now that I misjudged him, and that his open declaration, “I don’t know, let us look it up,” really did him great honour. I still have in my possession a portion of Pânini’s Vedic grammar translated by him. I put by the side of it my own translation, and he openly acknowledged that mine, with the passages taken from the Veda, was right. There was no humbug about Wilson. He never posed as a scholar; nay, I remember his saying to me more than once, “You see, I am not a scholar, I am a gentleman who likes Sanskrit, and that is all.” He certainly did like Sanskrit, and he knew it better than many a professor, but in his own way. He had enjoyed the assistance of really learned Pandits, and he never forgot to record their services. But he had himself cleared the ground—he had really done original work. In fact, he had done nothing but original work, and then he was abused for not having always found at the first trial what others discovered when standing on his shoulders. Again, he was found fault with for not having had a classical education. His education was, I believe, medical, but when once in the Indian Civil Service, he made himself useful in many ways, educational and otherwise. When he left India he was Master of the Mint. Such a man might not know Greek and Latin like F. A. von Schlegel, or any other professor, but he knew his own subject, and it is simply absurd if classical scholars imagine that anybody can carry on his Greek and Latin and at the same time make himself a perfect scholar in Sanskrit. Such a feeling is natural among small schoolmasters, but it is dying out at last among real scholars. I have known very good Sanskrit scholars who knew no Greek at all, and very little Latin. And I have also known Greek scholars who knew no Sanskrit and yet attempted comparisons between the two. When Lepsius was made a Member of the Berlin Academy, Lachmann, who ought to have known better, used to say of him: “He knows many things which nobody knows, but he also is ignorant of many things which everybody knows.” Such remarks never speak well for the man who makes them.
Another disadvantage from which the aged scholar suffers is that he is blamed for not having known in his youth what has been discovered in his old age, and is still violently assailed for opinions he may have uttered fifty years ago. When quite a young man I wrote, at Baron Bunsen’s request, a long letter on the Turanian Languages. It was published in 1854, but it still continues to be criticized as if it had been published last year. Of course, considering the rapid advance of linguistic studies, a great part of that letter became antiquated long ago; but at the time of its first appearance it contained nearly all that could then be known on these allophylian, that is, non-Aryan and non-Semitic languages; and I may, perhaps, quote the opinion of Professor Pott, no mean authority at that time, who, after severely criticizing my letter, declared that it belonged to the most important publications that had appeared on linguistic subjects for many years. And yet, though I have again and again protested that I could not possibly have known in 1854 what has been discovered since as to a number of these Turanian languages, everybody who writes on any of them seems to be most anxious to show that in 1894 he knows more than I did in 1854. No astronomer is blamed for not having known the planet Neptune before its discovery in 1846, or for having been wrong in accounting for the irregularities of Saturn. But let that pass; I only share the fate of others who have lived too long.
After all, all our knowledge, whatever show we may make of it, is very imperfect, and the more we know the better we learn how little it is that we do know, and how much of unexplored country there is beyond the country which we have explored. We must judge a man by what he has done—by his own original work. There are many scholars, and very useful they are in their own way, but if their books are examined, one easily finds the stores from which they borrowed their materials. They may add some notes of their own and even some corrections, particularly corrections of the authors from whom they have borrowed most; but at the end where is the fresh ore that they have raised; where is the gold they have extracted and coined? There are cases where the original worker is quite forgotten, whereas the retailers flourish. Well, facts are facts, whether known or not known, and the triumphal chariot of truth has to be dragged along by many hands and many shoulders.
FOOTNOTES:
[9] Herr Geheimrath von Spiegel now lives at Munich.