Mr. Müller is one of the agreeable luck’s-children who lay these swarthy miners under contribution for us, understand their mystic sign-language, and save us the trouble of climbing the mountain and scratching through the thickets for ourselves. Happy the man who can make knowledge entertaining! Thrice happy his readers! The author of these Lectures is already well known as not only, perhaps, the best living scholar of Sanscrit literature, (and by scholar we mean one who regards study as a means, not an end, and who is capable of drawing original conclusions,) but a savant who can teach without tiring, and can administer learning as if it were something else than medicine. Whoever reads this volume will regret that Mr. Müller’s eminent qualifications for the Boden Professorship at Oxford should have failed to turn the scale against the assumed superior orthodoxy of his competitor. Was it in Sanscrit that he was heterodox? or in Hindoo mythology?
The Lectures are nine in number. The titles of them will show the range and nature of Mr. Müller’s dissertations. They are, (1.) On the science of language as one of the physical sciences; (2.) On the growth of language in contradistinction to the history of language; (3.) On the empirical stage in the science of language; (4.) On the classificatory stage in the same; (5.) On the genealogical classification of languages; (6.) On comparative grammar; (7.) On the constituent elements of language; (8.) On the morphological classification of languages; (9.) On the theoretical stage in the science of languages and the origin of language. An Appendix contains a genealogical table of languages; and an ample Index (why have authors forgotten, what was once so well known, that an index is all that saves the contents of a book from being mere birds in the bush?) makes the volume as useful on the shelf as it is interesting and instructive in the hand. Of the catholic spirit in which Mr. Müller treats his various topics of discussion and illustration, his own theory of the true method of investigation is the best proof.
“There are two ways,” he says, in discussing the origin of language, “of judging of former philosophers. One is, to put aside their opinions as simply erroneous, where they differ from our own. This is the least satisfactory way of studying ancient philosophy. Another way is, to try to enter into the opinions of those from whom we differ, to make them, our a time at least, our own, till at least we discover the point of view from which each philosopher looked at the facts before him and catch the light in which he regarded them. We shall then find that there is much less of downright error in the history of philosophy than is commonly supposed; nay, we shall find nothing so conducive to a right appreciation of truth as a right appreciation of the error by which it is surrounded.” (p. 360. The Italics are ours.)
A mere philologist might complain that the book contained nothing new. And this is in the main true, though by no means altogether so, especially as regards the nomenclature of classification, and the illustration of special points by pertinent examples. In this last respect Mr. Müller is particularly happy, as, for instance, in what he says of “Yes ’r and Yes ’m.” (pp. 210 ff.) And as regards originality in the treatment of a purely scientific subject, a good deal depends on the meaning we attach to the term. If we understand by it striking conclusions drawn from theoretic premises, (as in Knox’s “Races of Man,”) clever generalizations from fortuitous analogies and coincidences insufficiently weighed, (as in Pococke’s “India in Greece,”) or, to take a philologic example, speculations suggestive of thought, it may be, but too insecurely based on positive data, (as in Rapp’s “Physiologie der Sprache,”) we shall vainly seek for such originality in Mr. Müller’s Lectures. But if we take it to mean, as we certainly prefer to do, safety of conclusion founded on thorough knowledge and comparison, clear statement guarded on all sides by long intimacy with the subject, and theory the result of legitimate deduction and judicial weighing of evidence, we shall find enough in the book to content us. Mr. Müller does not now enter the lists for the first time to win his spurs as an original writer. The plan of the work before us necessarily excluded any great display of recondite learning or of profound speculation. Delivered at first as popularly scientific lectures, and now published for the general reader, it seems to us admirably conceived and executed. Easily comprehensible, and yet always pointing out the sources of fuller investigation, it is ample both to satisfy the desire of those who wish to get the latest results of philology and to stimulate the curiosity of whoever wishes to go farther and deeper. It is by far the best and clearest summing-up of the present condition of the Science of Language that we have ever seen, while the liveliness of the style and the variety and freshness of illustration make it exceedingly entertaining.
We hope that a book of such slight assumption and such solid merit, a model of clear arrangement and popular treatment, may be widely read in this country, where the ignorance, carelessness, or dishonest good-nature even of journals professedly literary is apt to turn over the unlearned reader to such blind guides as Swinton’s “Rambles among Words,” compounds of plagiarism and pretension. Philology as a science is but just beginning to assert its claims in America, though we may already point with satisfaction to several distinguished workers in the field. The names of Professor Sophocles, at Cambridge, and Professor Whitney, at New Haven, rank with those of European scholars; and we have already borne the warmest testimony in these pages to the value of Mr. Marsh’s contributions to the study of English, a judgment which we are glad to see confirmed by the weighty authority of Mr, Müller.
- [On Translating Homer]. Three Lectures given at Oxford by MATTHEW ARNOLD, M.A., Professor of Poetry in the University of Oxford, and formerly Fellow of Oriel College. London: Longmans. 1861. pp. 104.
- [Homeric Translation in Theory and Practice]. A Reply to Matthew Arnold, Esq., Professor of Poetry at Oxford. By FRANCIS W. NEWMAN, a Translator of the Iliad. London: Williams & Norgate. 1801. pp. 104.
MR. F.W. NEWMAN, Professor of Latin in the University of London, probably without much hope of satisfying himself, and certain to dissatisfy every one who could read, or pretend to read, the original, did nevertheless complete and publish a translation of the “Iliad.” And now, unmindful of Bentley’s dictum, that no man was ever written down but by himself, he has published an answer to Mr. Arnold’s criticism of his work. Thackeray has said that it is of no use pretending not to care if your book is cut up by the “Times”; and it is not surprising that Mr. Newman should be uneasy at being first held up as an awful example to the youth of Oxford in academical lectures, and then to the public of England in a printed monograph, by a man of so much reputation for scholarship and taste as the present incumbent of Thomas Warton’s chair.
Mr. Arnold’s little book is, we need scarcely say, full of delicate criticism and suggestion. He treats his subject with great cleverness, and on many points carries the reader along with him. Especially good is all that he says about the “grand style,” so far as his general propositions are concerned. But when he comes to apply his criticisms, he instinctively feels the want of an absolute standard of judgment in aesthetic matters, and accordingly appeals to the verdict of “scholars,”—a somewhat vague term, to be sure, but by which he evidently understands men not merely of learning, but of taste. Of course, his reasoning is all a posteriori, and from the narrowest premises,—namely, from an unpleasant effect on his own nerves, to an efficient cause in the badness of Mr. Newman’s translation.
No quarrels, perhaps, are so bitter as those about matters of taste: hardly even is the odium theologicum, so profound as the odium æstheticum. A man, perhaps, will more easily forgive another for disbelieving his own total depravity than for believing that Guido is a great painter or Tupper an inspiring poet. The present dispute, therefore, tenderly personal as it is on the part of one of the pleaders, is especially interesting as showing a very decided and gratifying advance in the civilization of literary men to-day as compared with that of a century or indeed half a century ago. If we go back still farther, matters were still worse, and we find Luther and even Milton raking the kennel for dirt dirty enough to fling at an antagonist. But even within the memory of man, the style of the “Dunciad” was hardly obsolete in “Blackwood” and the “Quarterly.” It is very pleasant, in the present case, to see both attack and defence conducted with so gentlemanlike a reserve,—and the latter, which is even more surprising, with an approach to amenity.