XVI
LIFE OF BARON BUNSEN[19]
[19]
A Memoir of Baron Bunsen. By his Widow, Baroness Bunsen. Saturday
Review, 2nd May 1868.
Bunsen was really one of those persons, more common two centuries ago than now, who could belong as much to an adopted country as to that in which they were born and educated. A German of the Germans, he yet succeeded in also making himself at home in England, in appreciating English interests, in assimilating English thought and traditions, and exercising an important influence at a critical time on one extremely important side of English life and opinion. He was less felicitous in allying the German with the Englishman, perhaps from personal peculiarities of impatience, self-assertion, and haste, than one who has since trodden in his steps and realised more completely and more splendidly some of the great designs which floated before his mind. But few foreigners have gained more fairly, by work and by sympathy, the droit de cité in England than Bunsen.
It is a great pity that books must be so long and so bulky, and though Bunsen's life was a very full and active one in all matters of intellectual interest, and in some of practical interest also, we cannot help thinking that his biography would have gained by greater exercise of self-denial on the part of his biographer. It is altogether too prolix, and the distinction is not sufficiently observed between what is interesting simply to the Bunsen family and their friends, and what is interesting to the public. One of the points in which biographers, and the present author among the number, make mistakes, is in their use of letters. They never know when to stop in giving correspondence. If we had only one or two letters of a remarkable map, they would be worth printing, even if they were very much like other people's letters. But when we have bundles and letter-books without end to select from, selection, in a work professedly biographical, becomes advisable. We want types and specimens of a man's letters; and when the specimen has been given, we want no more, unless what is given is for its own sake remarkable. A great number of Bunsen's early letters are printed. Some of them are of much interest, showing how early the germs were formed of ideas and plans which occupied his life, and what were the influences by which he was surrounded, and how he comported himself in regard to them. But many more of these letters are what any young man of thought and of an affectionate nature might have written; and we do not want to have it shown us, over and over again, merely that Bunsen was thoughtful and affectionate. A wise and severe economy in this matter would have produced at least the same effect, at much less cost to the reader.
Bunsen was born in 1791, at Corbach, in the little principality of Waldeck, and grew up under the severe and simple training of a frugal German household, and with a solid and vigorous German education. He became in time Heyne's pupil at Göttingen, and very early showed the qualities which distinguished him in his after life—restless eagerness after knowledge and vast powers of labour, combined with large and ambitious, and sometimes vague, ideas, and with depth and fervour of religious sentiment. He entered on life when the reaction against the cold rationalistic theories of the age before him was stimulated by the excitement of the war of liberation; and in his deep and supreme interest in the Bible he kept to the last the stamp which he then received. More interesting than the recollections of a distinguished man's youth by his friends after he has become distinguished—which are seldom quite natural and not always trustworthy—are the contemporary records of the impressions made on him in his youth by those who were distinguished men when he was young. In some of Bunsen's letters we have such impressions. Thus he writes of Heyne in 1813:—
Poor and lonely did I arrive in this place [Göttingen]. Heyne received me, guided me, bore with me, encouraged me, showed me in himself the example of a high and noble energy, and indefatigable activity in a calling which was not that to which his merit entitled him. He might have superintended and administered and maintained an entire kingdom without more effort and with yet greater efficiency than the University for which he lived; he was too great for a mere philologer, and in general for a professor of mere learning in the age into which he was cast, and he was more distinguished in every other way than in this…. And what has he established or founded at the cost of this exertion of faculties? Learning annihilates itself, and the most perfect is the first submerged; for the next age scales with ease the height which cost the preceding the full vigour of life. Yet two things remain of him and will not perish—the one, the tribute left by his free spirit to the finest productions of the human mind; and what he felt, thought, and has immortalised in many men of excellence gone before. Read his explanations of Tischbein's engravings from Homer, his last preface to Virgil, and especially his oration on the death of Müller, and you will understand what I mean. I speak not of his political instinct, made evident in his survey of the public and private life of the ancients. The other memorial which will subsist of him, more warm in life than the first, is the remembrance of his generosity, to which numbers owe a deep obligation.
And of Schelling, about the same time, whom he had just seen in Munich:—
Schelling before all must be mentioned as having received me well, after his fashion, giving me frequent occasions of becoming acquainted with his philosophical views and judgments, in his own original and peculiar manner. His mode of disputation is rough and angular; his peremptoriness and his paradoxes terrible. Once he undertook to explain animal magnetism, and for this purpose to give an idea of Time, from which resulted that all is present and in existence—the Present as existing in the actual moment; the Future, as existing in a future moment. When I demanded the proof, he referred me to the word is, which applies to existence, in the sentence that "this is future." Seckendorf, who was present (with him I have become closely acquainted, to my great satisfaction), attempted to draw attention to the confounding the subjective (i.e. him who pronounces that sentence) with the objective; or, rather, to point out a simple grammatical misunderstanding—in short, declared the position impossible. "Well," replied Schelling drily, "you have not understood me." Two Professors (his worshippers), who were present, had meanwhile endeavoured by their exclamations, "Only observe, all is, all exists" (to which the wife of Schelling, a clever woman, assented), to help me into conviction; and a vehement beating the air—for arguing and holding fast by any firm point were out of the question—would have arisen, if I had not contrived to escape by giving a playful turn to the conversation. I am perfectly aware that Schelling could have expressed and carried through his real opinion far better—i.e. rationally. I tell the anecdote merely to give an idea of his manner in conversation.
At Göttingen he was one of a remarkable set, comprising Lachmann, Lücke, Brandis, and some others, thought as much of at the time as their friends, but who failed to make their way to the front ranks of the world. Like others of his countrymen, Bunsen began to find "that the world's destinies were not without their effect on him," and to feel dissatisfied with the comparatively narrow sphere of even German learning. The thought grew, and took possession of him, of "bringing over, into his knowledge and into his fatherland, the solemn and distant East," and to "draw the East into the study of the entire course of humanity (particularly of European, and more especially of Teutonic humanity)," making Germany the "central point of this study." Vast plans of philological and historical study, involving, as the only means then possible of carrying them out, schemes of wide travel and long sojourn in the East, opened on him. Indian and Persian literature, the instinctive certainty of its connection with the languages and thought of the West, and the imperfection of means of study in Europe, drew him, as many more were drawn at the time, to seek the knowledge which they wanted in foreign and distant lands. With Bunsen, this wide and combined study of philology, history, and philosophy, which has formed one of the characteristic pursuits of our time, was from the first connected with the study of the Bible as its central point. In 1815 came a decisive turning-point in his life—his acquaintance, and the beginning of his close connection, with Niebuhr, at Berlin; and from this time he felt himself a Prussian. "That State in Northern Germany," he writes to Brandis in 1815, "which gladly receives every German, from wheresoever he may come, and considers every one thus entering as a citizen born, is the true Germany":—