My father points out how rarely the sons of great musicians or great painters become distinguished in the same line themselves. “It seems,” he says, “almost as if the artistic talent were exhausted by one generation or one individual”; and I fear that, in my case at all events, the same remark applies to literary talent. I have done my best to string the fragments together into one connected whole, only making such insertions, elisions and alterations as appeared strictly necessary. Any deficiency in literary style that may be noticeable in portions of the book should be ascribed to the inexperience of the editor.
I have thought it right to insert the last chapter, which I call “A Confession,” though I am not sure that my father intended it to be included in his Autobiography. It will, however, explain the attitude which he observed throughout his life, in keeping aloof, as far as possible, from the arena of academic contention at Oxford. He was never chosen a member of the Hebdomadal Council, he rarely attended meetings of Convocation or Congregation; he felt that other people, with more leisure at their disposal, could be of more use there; but he never refused to work for his University, when he felt that he was able to render good service, and he acted for years as a Curator of the Bodleian Library and of the Taylorian Institute, and as a Delegate of the Clarendon Press.
With reference to the illustrations, it may be of interest to readers to know that the portraits of my grandfather and grandmother are taken from pencil-drawings by Adolf Hensel, the husband of Mendelssohn’s sister Fanny, herself a great musician, who, as my father tells us in Auld Lang Syne, really composed several of the airs that Mendelssohn published as his Songs without Words. The last portrait of my father is from a photograph taken soon after his arrival in Oxford by his great friend Thomson, afterwards Archbishop of York.
Nothing now remains for me but to acknowledge the debt that I owe personally to this book. “Work,” my father used often to say to me, “is the best healer of sorrow. In grief or disappointment, try hard work; it will not fail you.” And certainly during these three sad months, I have proved the truth of this saying. He could not have left me a surer comfort or more welcome distraction than the duty of preparing for press these pages, the last fruits of that mind which remained active and fertile to the last.
W. G. MAX MÜLLER.
Oxford, January, 1901.
CONTENTS
| CHAPTER | PAGE | |
| [I.] | Introductory | [1] |
| [II.] | Childhood at Dessau | [46] |
| [III.] | School-days at Leipzig | [97] |
| [IV.] | University | [115] |
| [V.] | Paris | [162] |
| [VI.] | Arrival in England | [188] |
| [VII.] | Early Days at Oxford | [218] |
| [VIII.] | Early Friends at Oxford | [272] |
| [IX.] | A Confession | [308] |
| [INDEX] | [319] | |
LIST OF PORTRAITS
| F. Max Müller, Aged Four | [Frontispiece] |
| FACING PAGE | |
| My Father | [46] |
| My Mother | [58] |
| F. Max Müller, Aged Fourteen | [106] |
| "" Aged Twenty | [156] |
| "" Aged Thirty | [268] |