The room which I took was almost entirely filled by an immense four-post bed. I had never seen such a structure before, and during the first night that I slept in it, I was in constant fear that the top of the bed would fall and smother me as in the German Märchen. When the landlady came in to see me in the morning, after asking how I had slept, the first thing she said was, “But, sir, don’t you want another ‘pillar’?” I looked bewildered, and said: “Why, what shall I do with another pillar? and where will you put it?” She then touched the pillows under my head and said, “Well, sir, you shall have another ‘pillar’ to-morrow.” “How shall I ever learn English,” I said to myself, “if a ‘pillar’ means really a soft pillow?”
But to return to my unknown friend, he came every day to show me things which I ought to see in London, and brought me tickets for theatres and concerts, which he said were sent to him. His name was William Howard Russell, endeared to so many, high and low, under the name of “Billy” Russell, the first and most brilliant war-correspondent of The Times during the Crimean War. He remained my warm and true friend through life, and even now when we are both cripples, we delight in meeting and talking over very distant days.
I had come over to London expecting to stay about a fortnight, but I had been there working at the Library in Leadenhall Street for nearly a month, and my work was far from done, when I thought that I ought to call and pay my respects to the Prussian Minister, Baron Bunsen. I little thought at the time when I was ushered into his presence that this acquaintance was to become the turning-point of my life. If I owed much to Burnouf, how can I tell what I owed to Bunsen? I was amazed at the kindness with which from the very first he received me. I had no claim whatever on him, and I had as yet done very little as a scholar. It is true that he had known my father in Italy, and that Humboldt, with his usual kindness, had written him a strong letter of recommendation on my behalf, but that was hardly sufficient reason to account for the real friendship with which he at once honoured me.
Baroness Bunsen, in the life of her husband, writes: “The kindred mind, their sympathy of heart, the unity in highest aspirations, a congeniality in principles, a fellowship in the pursuit of favourite objects, which attracted and bound Bunsen to his young friend (i. e. myself), rendered this connexion one of the happiest of his life.” I am proud to think it was so.
At first the chief bond between us was that I was engaged on a work which as a young man he had proposed to himself as the work of his life, namely, the editio princeps of the Rig-veda. Often has he told me how, at the time when he was prosecuting his studies at Göttingen, the very existence of such a book was unknown as yet in Germany. The name of Veda had no doubt been known, and there was a halo of mystery about it, as the oldest book of the world. But what it was and where it was to be found no one could tell. Mr. Astor, a pupil of Bunsen’s at Göttingen, had arranged to take Bunsen to India to carry on his researches there. But Bunsen waited and waited in Italy, till at last, after maintaining himself by giving private lessons, he went to Rome, was taken up by Brandes and Niebuhr, the Prussian Ambassador there, became the friend of the future Frederick William IV, and thus gradually drifted into diplomacy, giving up all hopes of discovering or rescuing the Rig-veda.
People have hardly any idea now, how, in spite of the East India Company conquering and governing India, India itself remained a terra incognita, unapproachable by the students of England and of Europe. That there were literary treasures to be discovered in India, that the Brahmans were the depositaries of ancient wisdom, was known through the labours of some of the most eminent servants of the East India Company. It had been known even before, through the interesting communications of Roman Catholic missionaries in India, that the manuscripts themselves, at least those of the Veda, were not forthcoming. Even as late as the times of Sir W. Jones, Colebrooke, and Professor Wilson, the Brahmans were most unwilling to part with MSS. of the Veda, except the Upanishads. Professor Wilson told me that once, when examining the library of a native Râjah, he came across some MSS. of the Rig-veda, and began turning them over; but “I observed,” he said, “the ominous and threatening looks of some of the Brahmans present, and thought it wiser to beat a retreat.” Dr. Mill had known of a gentleman who had a very sacred hymn of the Veda, the Gayatri, printed at Calcutta. The Brahmans were furious at this profanation, and when the gentleman died soon after, they looked upon his premature death as the vengeance of the offended gods. Colebrooke, however, was allowed to possess himself of several most valuable Vedic MSS., and he found Brahmans quite ready to read with him, not only the classical texts, but also portions of the Veda. “They do not even,” he writes, “conceal from us the most sacred texts of the Veda.” His own essays on the Veda appeared in the Asiatic Researches as early as 1801. But people went on dreaming about the Veda, instead of reading Colebrooke’s essays.
It was curious, however, that at the time when I prepared my edition of the Rig-veda, Vedic scholarship was at a very low ebb in Bengal itself, and there were few Brahmans there who knew the whole of the Rig-veda by heart, as they still did in the South of India. Manuscripts were never considered in India as of very high authority; they were always over-ruled by the oral traditions of certain schools. However, such manuscripts, good and bad, but mostly bad, existed, and after a time some of them reached England, France, and even Germany. Portions of those in Berlin and Paris I had copied and collated, so that I could show Bunsen the very book which he had been in search of in his youth. This opened his heart to me as well as the doors of his house. “I am glad,” he said, “to have lived to see the Veda. Whatever you want, let me know; I look upon you as myself grown young again.” And he did help me, as only a father can help his son.
Perhaps he expected too much from the Veda, as many other people did at that time, and before the verba ipsissima were printed. As the oldest book that ever was composed, the Veda was supposed to give us a picture of what man was in his most primitive state, with his most primitive ideas, and his most primitive language. Everybody interested in the origin and the first development of language, thought, religion, and social institutions, looked forward to the Veda as a new revelation. All such dreams, natural enough before the Veda was known, were dispersed by my laying sacrilegious hands on the Veda itself, and actually publishing it, making it public property, to the dismay of the Brahmans in India, and to the delight of all Sanskrit scholars in Europe. The learned essays of Colebrooke in India, and the extracts published by Rosen, the Oriental librarian of the British Museum, might indeed have taught people that the Veda was not a book without any antecedents, that it would not tell us the secrets of Adam and Eve, or of Deukalion and Pyrrha. I myself had both said and written that the Veda, like an old oak tree, shows hundreds and thousands of circles within circles; and yet I was afterwards held responsible for having excited the wildest hopes among archaeologists, when I had done my best, if not to destroy them, at all events to reduce them to their proper level. Schelling seemed quite disappointed when I showed him some of the translations of the hymns of the Rig-veda; and Bunsen, who was still under Schelling’s influence, had evidently expected a great many more of such philosophical hymns as the famous one beginning:
“There was not nought nor was there aught at that time.”
To the scholar, no doubt, the Veda remained and always will remain the oldest of real books, that has been preserved to us in an almost miraculous way. By book, however, as I often explained, I mean a book divided into chapters and verses, having a beginning and an end, and handed down to us in an alphabetic form of writing. China may have possessed older books in a half phonetic, half symbolic writing; Egypt certainly possessed older hieroglyphic inscriptions and papyri; Babylon had its cuneiform monuments; and certain portions of the Old Testament may have existed in a written form at the time of Josiah, when Hilkiah, the high priest, found the law book in the sanctuary (2 Kings xxii. 8). But the Veda, with its ten books or Mandalas, its 1017 hymns or Suktas, with every consonant and vowel and accent plainly written, was a different thing. It may safely be called a book. No doubt it existed for a long time, as it does even at present, in oral tradition, but as it was in tradition, so it was when reduced to writing, and in either form I doubt whether any other real book can rival it in antiquity. More important, however, than the purely chronological antiquity of the book, is the antiquity or primitiveness of the thoughts which it contains. If the people of the Veda did not turn out to be quite such savages as was hoped and expected, they nevertheless disclosed to us a layer of thought which can be explored nowhere else. The Vedic poets were not ashamed of exposing their fear that the sun might tumble down from the sky, and there are no other poets, as far as I know, who still trembled at the same not quite unnatural thought. Nor do I find even savages who still wonder and express their surprise that black cows should produce white milk. Is not that childish enough for any ancient or modern savage? Mere chronology is here of as little avail as with modern savages, whose customs and beliefs, though known as but of yesterday, are represented to us as older than the Veda, older than Babylonian cylinders, older than anything written. When certain modern savages recognize the relationship of paternity, maternity, and consanguinity, this is called very ancient. If they admit traditional restrictions as to marriage, food, the treatment of the dead, nay, even a life to come, this too, no doubt, may be very old; but it may be of yesterday also. There are even quite new gods, whose genesis has been watched by living missionaries. The great difficulty in all such researches is to distinguish between what is common to human nature, and what is really inherited or traditional. All such questions have only as yet been touched upon, and they must wait for their answer till real scholars will take up the study of the language of living savages, in the same scholarlike spirit in which they have taken up the study of Vedic and Babylonian savages. But we must have patience and learn to wait. It has been a favourite idea among anthropologists that the savage races inhabiting parts of India give us a correct idea of what the Aryans of India were before they were civilized. It may safely be said of this as of other mere ideas, that it may be true, but that there is no evidence to show that it is true. At all events it takes much for granted, and neglects, as it would seem, the very lessons which the theory of evolution has taught us. It is the nature of evolution to be continuous, and not to proceed per saltum. Therein lies the beauty of genealogical evolution that we can recognize the fibres which connect the upper strata with the lower, till we strike the lowest, or at least that which contains what seem to be the seeds and germs of early thoughts, words, and acts. We can trace the most modern forms of language back to Sanskrit, or rather to that postulated linguistic stratum of which Sanskrit formed the most prominent representative, just as we can trace the French Dieu back to Latin Deus and Sanskrit Devas, the brilliant beings behind the phenomena of nature; and again behind them, Dyaus, the brilliant sky, the Greek Zeus, the Roman Iovis and Iuppiter, the most natural of all the Aryan gods of nature. This is real evolution, a real causal nexus between the present and the past. It used to be called history or pragmatic history, whether we take history in the sense of the description of evolution, or in that of evolution itself. History has generally to begin with the present, to go back to the past, and to point out the palpable steps by which the past became again and again the present. Evolution, on the contrary, prefers to begin with the distant past, to postulate formations, even if they have left no traces, and to speak of those almost imperceptible changes by which the postulated past became the perceptible present, as not only necessary, but as real. Perhaps the difference is of no importance, but the historical method seems certainly the more accurate, and the more satisfactory from a purely scientific point of view.