MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY
[Illustration: _F. Max Müller Aged 4._]
MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY
A FRAGMENT
BY THE
RT. HON. PROFESSOR F. MAX MÜLLER, K.M.
_WITH PORTRAITS_
New York
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
1901
COPYRIGHT, 1901, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
TROW DIRECTORY
PRINTING AND BOOKBINDING COMPANY
NEW YORK
PREFACE
For some years past my father had, in the intervals of more serious
work, occupied his leisure moments in jotting down reminiscences of
his early life. In 1898 and 1899 he issued the two volumes of _Auld
Lang Syne_, which contained recollections of his friends, but very
little about his own life and career. In the Introductory Chapter to
the Autobiography he explains fully the reasons which led him, at his
advanced age, to undertake the task of writing his own Life, and he
began, but alas! too late, to gather together the fragments that he
had written at different times. But even during the last two years of
his life, and after the first attack of the illness which finally
proved fatal, he would not devote himself entirely to what he
considered mere recreation, as can be seen from such a work as his
_Six Systems of Indian Philosophy_ published in May, 1889, and from
the numerous articles which continued to appear up to the very time of
his death.
During the last weeks of his life, when we all knew that the end could
not be far off, the Autobiography was constantly in his thoughts, and
his great desire was to leave as much as possible ready for
publication. Even when he was lying in bed far too weak to sit up in a
chair, he continued to work at the manuscript with me. I would read
portions aloud to him, and he would suggest alterations and dictate
additions. I see that we were actually at work on this up to the 19th
of October, and on the 28th he was taken to his well-earned rest. One
of the last letters that I read to him was a letter from Messrs.
Longmans, his lifelong publishers, urging the publication of the
fragments of the Autobiography that he had then written.
My father’s object in writing his Autobiography was twofold: firstly,
to show what he considered to have been his mission in life, to lay
bare the thread that connected all his labours; and secondly, to
encourage young struggling scholars by letting them see how it had
been possible for one of themselves, without fortune, a stranger in a
strange land, to arrive at the position to which he attained, without
ever sacrificing his independence, or abandoning the unprofitable and
not very popular subjects to which he had determined to devote his
life.
Unfortunately the last chapter takes us but little beyond the
threshold of his career. There is enough, however, to enable us to see
how from his earliest student days his leanings were philosophical and
religious rather than classical; how the study of Herbart’s philosophy
encouraged him in the work in which he was engaged as a mere student,
the Science of Language and Etymology; how his desire to know
something special, that no other philosopher would know, led him to
explore the virgin fields of Oriental literature and religions. With
this motive he began the study of Arabic, Persian, and finally
Sanskrit, devoting himself more especially to the latter under
Brockhaus and Rückert, and subsequently under Burnouf, who persuaded
him to undertake the colossal work of editing the Rig-veda.
The Autobiography breaks off before the end of the period during which
he devoted himself exclusively to Sanskrit. It is idle to speculate
what course his life’s work might have taken, had he been elected to
the Boden Professorship of Sanskrit; but he lived long enough to
realize that his rejection for that chair in 1860, which was so hard
to bear at the time, was really a blessing in disguise, as it enabled
him to turn his attention to more general subjects, and devote himself
to those philological, philosophical, religious and mythological
studies, which found their expression in a series of works commencing
with his _Lectures on the Science of Language_, 1861, and terminating
with his _Contributions to the Science of Mythology_, 1897,—“the
thread that connects the origin of thought and language with the
origin of mythology and religion.”
As to his advice to struggling scholars, the self-depreciation,
which, as Professor Jowett said, is one of the greatest dangers of an
autobiography, makes my father rather conceal the real causes of his
success in life. He even goes so far as to say, “everything in my
career came about most naturally, not by my own effort, but owing to
those circumstances or to that environment, of which we have heard so
much of late”: or again, “it was really my friends who did everything
for me and helped me over many a stile and many a ditch.” No doubt in
one sense this is true, but not in the sense in which it would have
been true had he, when at the University, accepted the offer which he
tells us a wealthy cousin made him, to adopt him and send him into the
Austrian diplomatic service, and even to procure him a wife and a
title into the bargain. The friends who helped him, men such as
Humboldt, Burnouf, Bunsen, Stanley, Kingsley, Liddell, to mention only
a few, were men whose very friendship was the surest proof of my
father’s merits. The real secret of his success lay not in his
friends, but in himself;—in the knowledge that his success or failure
in life depended entirely on his own efforts; in the fixity of purpose
which made him refuse all offers that would lead him from the pathway
that he had laid down for himself; and in the unflagging industry with
which he strove to reach the goal of his ambition. “My very
struggles,” he writes, “were certainly a help to me.”
When I came to examine the manuscript with a view to sending it to
press, I found that there was a good deal of work necessary before it
could be published in book form. The fragments were in many cases
incomplete; there was no division into chapters, no connexion between
the various periods and episodes of his life; important incidents were
omitted; while, owing to the intermittent way in which he had been
writing, there were frequent repetitions. My father was always most
critical of his own style, and would often, when correcting his
proof-sheets, alter a whole page, because a word or a phrase
displeased him, or because some new idea, some happier mode of
expression, occurred to him; but in the case of his Autobiography, the
only revision that he was able to give, was on his deathbed, while I
read the manuscript aloud to him.
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
MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTORY
After the publication of the second volume of my _Auld Lang Syne_,
1899, I had a good deal of correspondence, of public criticism, and of
private communings also with myself, whether I should continue my
biographical records in the form hitherto adopted, or give a more
personal character to my recollections. Some of my friends were
evidently dissatisfied. “The recollections of your friends and the
account of the influence they exercised on you,” they said, “are
interesting, no doubt, as far as they go, but we want more. We want to
know the springs, the aspirations, the struggles, the failures, and
achievements of your life. We want to know how you yourself look at
yourself and at your past life and its various incidents.” What they
really wanted was, in fact, an autobiography. “No one,” as a friend of
mine, not an Irishman, said, “could do that so well as yourself, and
you will never escape a biographer.” I confess that did not frighten
me very much. I did not think the danger of a biography very
imminent. Besides, I had already revised two biographies and several
biographical notices even during my lifetime. No sensible man ought to
care about posthumous praise or posthumous blame. Enough for the day
is the evil thereof. Our contemporaries are our right judges, our
peers have to give their votes in the great academies and learned
societies, and if they on the whole are not dissatisfied with the
little we have done, often under far greater difficulties than the
world was aware of, why should we care for the distant future? Who was
a greater giant in philosophy than Hegel? Who towered higher than
Darwin in natural science? Yet in one of the best German reviews[1]
the following words of a young German biologist[2] are quoted, and not
without a certain approval: “Darwinism belongs now to history, like
that other _curiosum_ of our century, the Hegelian philosophy. Both
are variations on the theme, How can a generation be led by the nose?
and they are not calculated to raise our departing century in the eyes
of later generations.”
[1] _Deutsche Rundschau_, Feb., 1900, p. 249.
[2] Driesch, _Biologisches Centralblatt_, 1896, p. 335.
If I was afraid of anything, it was not so much the severity of future
judges, as the extreme kindness and leniency which distinguish most
biographies in our days. It is true, it would not be easy for those
who have hereafter to report on our labours to discover the red
thread that runs through all of them from our first stammerings to our
latest murmurings. It might be said that in my own case the thread
that connects all my labours is very visible, namely, the thread that
connects the origin of thought and languages with the origin of
mythology and religion. Everything I have done was, no doubt,
subordinate to these four great problems, but to lay bare the
connecting links between what I have written and what I wanted to
write and never found time to write, is by no means easy, not even for
the author himself. Besides, what author has ever said the last word
he wanted to say, and who has not had to close his eyes before he
could write Finis to his work? There are many things still which I
should like to say, but I am getting tired, and others will say them
much better than I could, and will no doubt carry on the work where I
had to leave it unfinished. We owe much to others, and we have to
leave much to others. For throwing light on such points an
autobiography is, no doubt, better adapted than any biography written
by a stranger, if only we can at the same time completely forget that
the man who is described is the same as the man who describes.
“Friends,” as Professor Jowett said, “always think it necessary
(except Boswell, that great genius) to tell lies about their deceased
friend; they leave out all his faults lest the public should
exaggerate them. But we want to know his faults,—hat is probably
the most interesting part of him.”
Jowett knew quite well, and he did not hesitate to say so, that to do
much good in this world, you must be a very able and honest man,
thinking of nothing else day and night; and he adds, “you must also be
a considerable piece of a rogue, having many reticences and
concealments; and I believe a good sort of roguery is never to say a
word against anybody, however much they may deserve it.”
Now Professor Jowett has certainly done some good work at Oxford, but
if any one were to say that he also was a considerable piece of a
rogue, what an outcry there would be among the sons of Balliol. Jowett
thought that the only chance of a good biography was for a man to
write memoirs of himself, and what a pity that he did not do so in his
own case. His friends, however, who had to write his Life were wise,
and he escaped what of late has happened to several eminent men. He
escaped the testimonials for this, and testimonials for another life,
such as they are often published in our days.
Testimonials are bad enough in this life, when we have to select one
out of many candidates as best fitted for an office, and it is but
natural that the electors will hardly ever look at them, but will try
to get their information through some other channel. But what are
called _post obit_ testimonials really go beyond everything yet known
in funeral panegyrics. Of course, as no one is asked for such
testimonials except those who are known to have been friends of the
departed, these testimonials hardly ever contain one word of blame.
One feels ashamed to write such testimonials, but if you are asked,
what can you do without giving offence? We are placed altogether in a
false position. Let any one try to speak the truth and nothing but the
truth, and he will find that it is almost impossible to put down
anything that in the slightest way might seem to reflect on the
departed. The mention of the most innocent failings in an obituary
notice is sure to offend somebody, the widow or the children, or some
dear friend. I thought that my Recollections had hitherto contained
nothing that could possibly offend anybody, nothing that could not
have been published during the lifetime of the man to whom it
referred. But no; I had ever so many complaints, and I gladly left
out, in later editions, names which in many cases were really of no
consequence compared with what they said and did.
Surely every man has his faults and his little and often ridiculous
weaknesses, and these weaknesses belong quite as much to a man’s
character as his strength; nay, with the suppression of the former the
latter would often become almost unintelligible.
I like the biographies of such friends of mine as Dean Stanley,
Charles Kingsley, and Baron Bunsen. But even these are deficient in
those shadows which would but help to bring out all the more clearly
the bright points in their character. We should remember the words of
Dr. Wendell Holmes: “We all want to draw perfect ideals, and all the
coin that comes from Nature’s mint is more or less clipped, filed,
‘sweated,’ or bruised, and bent and worn, even if it was pure metal
when stamped, which is more than we can claim, I suppose, for anything
human.” True, very true; and what would the departed himself say to
such biographies as are now but too common,—most flattering pictures
no doubt, but pictures without one spot or wrinkle? In Germany it was
formerly not an uncommon thing for the author of a book to write a
self-review (Selbst-Kritik), and these were generally far better than
reviews written by friends or enemies. For who knows the strong and
weak points of a book so well as the author? True; but a whole life is
more difficult to review and to criticize than a single book.
Nevertheless it must be admitted that an autobiography has many
advantages, and it might be well if every man of note, nay, every man
who has something to say for himself that he wishes posterity to know,
should say it himself. This would in time form a wonderful archive for
psychological study. Something of the kind has been done already at
Berlin in preserving private correspondences. Of course it is
difficult to keep such archives within reasonable limits, but here
again I am not afraid of self-laudation so much as of self-depreciation.
Professor Jowett, who did not write his own biography, was quite
right in saying that there is great danger of an autobiography being
rather self-depreciatory; there is certainly something so nauseous in
self-praise that most people would shrink far more from self-praise
than from self-blame. There may be some kind of subtle self-admiration
even in the fault-finding of an outspoken autobiographer; but who can
dive into those deepest depths of the human soul? To me it seems that
if an honest man takes himself by the neck, and shakes himself, he can
do it far better than anybody else, and the castigation, if well
deserved, comes certainly with a far better grace from himself than if
administered by others.
Few men, I believe, know their real goodness and greatness. Some of
the most handsome women, so we are assured, pass through life without
ever knowing from their looking-glass that they are handsome. And it
is certainly true that men, from sad experience, know their weak
points far better than their good points, which they look on as no
more than natural.
The Autos, for instance, described by John Stuart Mill, has no cause
to be grateful to the Autos that wrote his biography. Mill had been
threatened by several future biographers, and he therefore wrote the
short biographical account of himself almost in self-defence. But
besides the truly miraculous, and, if related by anybody else, hardly
credible achievements of his early boyhood and youth, his great
achievements in later life, the influence which he exercised both by
his writings and still more by his personal and public character,
would have found a far more eloquent and truthful interpreter in a
stranger than in Mill himself. I remember another case where a most
distinguished author tried to escape the oil and the blessings,
perhaps the opposite also, from the hands of his future biographers.
Froude destroyed the whole of his correspondence, and he wished
particularly that all letters written to him in the fullest confidence
should be burnt,—and they were. I think it was a pity, for I know
what valuable letters were destroyed in that _auto da fé_; and yet
when he had done all this, he seems to have been seized with fear, and
just before he returned to Oxford as Regius Professor of Modern
History he began to write a sketch of his own life, which was found
among his papers. Interesting it certainly was, but fortunately his
best friends prevented its publication. It would have added nothing to
what we know of him in his writings, and would never have put his real
merits in their proper light. Besides, it came to an end with his
youth and told us little of his real life.
I flattered myself that I had found the true way out of all these
difficulties, by writing not exactly my own life, but recollections of
my friends and acquaintances who had influenced me most, and guided me
in my not always easy passage through life. As in describing the
course of a river, we cannot do better than to describe the shores
which hem in and divert the river and are reflected on its waves, I
thought that by describing my environment, my friends, and fellow
workers, I could best describe the course of my own life. I hoped also
that in this way I myself could keep as much as possible in the
background, and yet in describing the wooded or rocky shores with
their herds, their cottages, and churches, describe their reflected
image on the passing river.
But now I am asked to give a much fuller account of myself, not only
of what I have seen, but also of what I have been, what were the
objects or ideals of my life, how far I have succeeded in carrying
them out, and, as I said, how often I have failed to accomplish what I
had sketched out as my task in life. People wished to know how a boy,
born and educated in a small and almost unknown town in the centre of
Germany, should have come to England, should have been chosen there to
edit the oldest book of the world, the Veda of the Brahmans, never
published before, whether in India or in Europe, should have passed
the best part of his life as a professor in the most famous and, as it
was thought, the most exclusive University in England, and should
actually have ended his days as a Member of Her Majesty’s most
honourable Privy Council. I confess myself it seems a very strange
career, yet everything came about most naturally, not by my own
effort, but owing again to those circumstances or to that environment
of which we have heard so much of late.
Young, struggling men also have written to me, and asked me how I
managed to keep my head above water in that keen struggle for life
that is always going on in the whirlpool of the learned world of
England. They knew, for I had never made any secret of it, how poor I
was in worldly goods, and how, as I said at Glasgow, I had nothing to
depend on after I left the University, but those fingers with which I
still hold my pen and write so badly that I can hardly read my
manuscript myself. When I arrived I had no family connections in
England, nor any influential friends, “and yet,” I was told, “in a
foreign country, you managed to reach the top of your profession. Tell
us how you did it; and how you preserved at the same time your
independence and never forsook the not very popular subjects, such as
language, mythology, religion, and philosophy, on which you continued
to write to the very end of your life.”
I generally said that most of these questions could best be answered
from my books, but they replied that few people had time to read all I
had written, and many would feel grateful for a thread to lead them
through this labyrinth of books, essays, and pamphlets, which have
issued from my workshop during the last fifty years.[3]
[3] As giving a clear and complete abstract of my writings I
may now recommend M. Montcalm’s _L’origine de la Pensée et de
la Parole_, Paris, 1900.
All I could say was that each man must find his own way in life, but
if there was any secret about my success, it was simply due to the
fact that I had perfect faith, and went on never doubting even when
everything looked grey and black about me. I felt convinced that what
I cared for, and what I thought worthy of a whole life of hard work,
must in the end be recognized by others also as of value, and as
worthy of a certain support from the public. Had not Layard gained a
hearing for Assyrian bulls? Did not Darwin induce the world to take an
interest in Worms, and in the Fertilization of Orchids? And should the
oldest book and the oldest thoughts of the Aryan world remain despised
and neglected?
For many years I never thought of appointments or of getting on in the
world in a pecuniary sense. My friends often laughed at me, and when I
think of it now, I confess I must have seemed very Quixotic to many of
those who tried for this and that, got lucrative appointments, married
rich wives, became judges and bishops, ambassadors and ministers, and
could hardly understand what I was driving at with my Sanskrit
manuscripts, my proof-sheets and revises. Perhaps I did not know
myself. Still I was not quite so foolish as they imagined. True, I
declined several offers made to me which seemed very advantageous in a
worldly sense, but would have separated me entirely from my favourite
work.
When at last a professorship of Modern Literature was offered me at
Oxford, I made up my mind, though it was not exactly what I should
have liked, to give up half of my time to studies required by this
professorship, keeping half of my time for the Veda and for Sanskrit
in general. This was not so bad after all. People often laughed at me
for being professor of the most modern languages, and giving so much
of my time and labour to the most ancient language and literature in
the world. Perhaps it was not quite right my giving up so much of my
time to modern languages, a subject so remote from my work in life,
but it was a concession which I could make with a good conscience,
having always held that language was one and indivisible, and that
there never had been a break between Sanskrit, Latin, and French, or
Sanskrit, Gothic, and German. One of my first lectures at Oxford was
“On the antiquity of modern languages,” so that I gave full notice to
the University as to how I meant to treat my subject, and on the whole
the University seems to have been satisfied with my professorial work,
so that when afterwards for very good reasons, whether financial,
theological, or national, I, or rather my friends, failed to secure a
majority in Convocation for a professorship of Sanskrit, the
University actually founded for me a Professorship of Comparative
Philology, an honour of which I had never dreamt, and to secure which
I certainly had never taken any steps.
Here is all my secret. At first, as I said, it required faith, but it
also required for many years a perfect indifference as to worldly
success. And here again in my career as a Sanskrit scholar, mere
circumstances were of great importance. They were circumstances which
I was glad to accept, but which I could never have created myself. It
was surely a mere accident that the Directors of the Old East India
Company voted a large sum of money for printing the six large quartos
of the Rig-veda of about a thousand pages each. It was at the time
when the fate of the Company hung in the balance, and when Bunsen, the
Prussian Minister, made himself _persona grata_ by delivering a speech
at one of the public dinners in the City, setting forth in eloquent
words the undeniable merits of the Old Company and the wonderful work
they had achieved. It was likewise a mere accident that I should have
become known to Bunsen, and that he should have shown me so much
kindness in my literary work. He had himself tried hard to go to India
to discover the Rig-veda, nay, to find out whether there was still
such a thing as the Veda in India. The same Bunsen, His Excellency
Baron Bunsen, the Prussian Minister in London, on his own accord went
afterwards to see the Chairman and the Directors of the East India
Company, and explained to them what the Rig-veda was, and that it
would be a real disgrace if such a work were published in Germany; and
they agreed to vote a sum of money such as they had never voted
before for any literary undertaking. Though after the mutiny nothing
could save them, I had at least the satisfaction of dedicating the
first volume of my edition of the Rig-veda to the Chairman and the
Directors of the much abused East India Company,—much abused though
splendidly defended also by no less a man than John Stuart Mill.
This is what I mean by friends and circumstances, and that is the
environment which I wished to describe in my Recollections instead of
always dwelling on what I meant to do myself and what I did myself.
Small and large things work wonderfully together. It was the change
threatening the government of India, and a mighty change it was, that
gave me the chance of publishing the Veda, a very small matter as it
may seem in the eyes of most people, and yet intended to bring about
quite as mighty a change in our views of the ancient people of the
world, particularly of their languages and religions. This, too—the
development of language and religion—seems of importance to some
people who do not care two straws for the East India Company,
particularly if it helps us to learn what we really are ourselves, and
how we came to be what we are.
In one sense biographies and autobiographies are certainly among the
most valuable materials for the historian. Biography, as Heinrich
Simon, not Henri Simon, said, is the best kind of history, and the
life of one man, if laid open before us with all he thought and all he
did, gives us a better insight into the history of his time than any
general account of it can possibly do.
Now it is quite true that the life of a quiet scholar has little to do
with history, except it may be the history of his own branch of study,
which some people consider quite unimportant, while to others it seems
all-important. This is as it ought to be, till the universal historian
finds the right perspective, and assigns to each branch of study and
activity its proper place in the panorama of the progress of mankind
towards its ideals. Even a quiet scholar, if he keeps his eyes open,
may now and then see something that is of importance to the historian.
While I was living in small rooms at Leipzig, or lodging _au
cinquième_ in the Rue Royale at Paris, or copying manuscripts in a
dark room of the old East India House in Leadenhall Street, I now and
then caught glimpses of the mighty stream of history as it was rushing
by. At Leipzig I saw much of Robert Blum who was afterwards _fusillé_
at Vienna by Windischgrätz in defiance of all international law, for
he was a member of the German Diet, then sitting at Frankfurt. From my
windows at Paris I looked over the _Boulevard de la Madeleine_, and
down on the right to the _Chambre des Députés_, and I saw from my
windows the throne of Louis Philippe carried along by its four legs by
four women on horseback, with Phrygian caps and red scarfs, and I saw
the next morning from the same windows the stretchers carrying the
dead and wounded from the Boulevards to a hospital at the back of my
street. In my small study at the East India House I saw several of the
Directors, Colonel Sykes and others, and heard them discussing the
fate of the East India Company and of the vast empire of India too,
and at the same time the private interests of those who hoped to be
Members of the new India Council, and those who despaired of that
distinction. I was the first to bring the news of the French
Revolution in February to London, and presented a bullet that had
smashed the windows of my room at Paris, to Bunsen, who took it in the
evening to Lord Palmerston. After I had seen the Revolution in Paris
and the flight of the King and the Duchesse d’Orléans, I was in time
to see in London the Chartist Deputation to Parliament, and the
assembled police in Trafalgar Square, when Louis Napoleon served as a
Special Constable, and I heard the Duke of Wellington explain to
Bunsen, that though no soldier was seen in the streets there was
artillery hidden under the bridges, and ready to act if wanted. I
could add more, but I must not anticipate, and after all, to me all
these great events seemed but small compared with a new manuscript of
the Veda sent from India, or a better reading of an obscure passage.
_Diversos diversa iuvant_, and it is fortunate that it should be so.
All these things, I thought, should form part of my Recollections,
and my own little self should disappear as much as possible. Even the
pronoun I should meet the reader but seldom, though in Recollections
it was as impossible to leave it out altogether as it would be to take
away the lens from a photographic camera. Now I believe I have always
been most willing to yield to my friends, and I shall in this matter
also yield to them so far that in the Recollections which follow there
will be more of my inward and outward struggles; but I must on the
whole adhere to my old plan. I could not, if I would, neglect the
environment of my life, and the many friends that advised and helped
me, and enabled me to achieve the little that I may have achieved in
my own line of study.
If my friends had been different from what they were, should I not
have become a different man myself, whether for good or for evil? And
the same applies to our natural surroundings also. And here I must
invoke the patience of my readers, if I try to explain in as few words
as possible what I think about _environment_, and what about
_heredity_ or _atavism_.
I was a thorough Darwinian in ascribing the shaping of my career to
environment, though I was always very averse to atavism, of which we
have heard so much lately in most biographies. Even with respect to
environment, however, I could not go quite so far as certain of our
Darwinian friends, who maintain that everything is the result of
environment, or translated into biographical language, that everybody
is a creature of circumstances. No, I could not go so far as that.
Environment may shape our course and may shape us, but there must be
something that is shaped, and allows itself to be shaped. I was once
seriously asked by one who considers himself a Darwinian whether I did
not know that the Mammoth was driven by the extreme cold of the
Pleiocene Period to grow a thick fur in his struggle for life. That he
grew then a thicker fur, I knew, but that surely does not explain the
whole of the Mammoth, with and without a thick fur, before and after
the fur. It is really a pity to see for how many of these downright
absurdities Darwin is made responsible by the Darwinians. He has
clearly shown how in many cases the individual may be modified almost
beyond recognition by environment, but the individual must always have
been there first. Before we had a spaniel and a Newfoundland dog there
must have been some kind of dog, neither so small as the spaniel nor
so large as the Newfoundland, and no one would now doubt that these
two belonged to the same species and presupposed some kind of a less
modified canine creature. It is equally true that every individual man
has been modified by his surroundings or environment, if not to the
same extent as certain animals, yet very considerably, as in the case
of Kaspar Hauser, the man with the iron mask, or the mutineers of the
_Bounty_ in the Pitcairn Islands. But there must have been the man
first, before he could be so modified. Now it was this very
individual, my own self in fact, the spiritual self even more than the
physical, that interested my critics, while I thought that the
circumstances which moulded that self would be of far greater interest
than the self itself. Of course all the modifications that men now
undergo are nothing if compared to the early modifications which
produced what we speak of as racial, linguistic, or even national
peculiarities. That we are English or German, that we are white or
black, nay, if you like, that we are human beings at all, all this has
modified our self, or our germ-plasm, far more powerfully than
anything that can happen to us as individuals now.
When my friends and readers assured me that an account of my early
struggles in the battle of life would be useful to many a young,
struggling man, all I could say was that here again it was really my
friends who did everything for me, and helped me over many a stile,
and many a ditch, nay, without whom I should never have done whatever
I did for the Sciences of Language, of Mythology, and Religion, in
fact for Anthropology in the widest sense of that word. My very
struggles were certainly a help to me, even my opponents were most
useful to me. The subjects on which I wrote had hardly been touched on
in England, at least from the historical point of view which I took,
and I had not only to overcome the indifference of the public, but to
disarm as much as possible the prejudices often felt, and sometimes
expressed also, against anything made in Germany! Now I confess I
could never understand such a prejudice among men of science. Was I
more right or more wrong because I was born in Germany? Is scientific
truth the exclusive property of one nation, of Germany, or of England?
If I say two and two make four in German, is that less true because it
is said by a German? and if I say, no language without thought, no
thought without language, has that anything to do with my native
country? The prejudice against strangers and particularly against
Germans is, no doubt, much stronger now than it was at the time when I
first came to England. I had spent nearly two years in Paris, and
there too there existed then so little of unfriendly feeling towards
Germany, that one of the best reviews to which the rising scholars and
best writers of Paris contributed was actually called _Revue
Germanique_. Who would now venture to publish in Paris such a review
and under such a title? If there existed such an anti-German feeling
anywhere in England when I arrived here in the year 1846, one would
suppose that it existed most strongly at Oxford. And so it did, no
doubt, particularly among theologians. With them German meant much the
same as unorthodox, and unorthodox was enough at that time to taboo a
man at Oxford. In one of the sermons preached in these early days at
St. Mary’s, German theologians such as Strauss and Neander (_sic_)
were spoken of as fit only to be drowned in the German Ocean, before
they reached the shores of England. I do not add what followed: the
story is too well known. I was chiefly amused by the juxtaposition of
Strauss and Neander, whose most orthodox lectures on the history of
the Christian Church I had attended at Berlin. Neander was certainly
to us at Berlin the very pattern of orthodoxy, and people wondered at
my attending his lectures. But they were good and honest lectures. He
was quite a character, and I feel tempted to go a little out of my way
in speaking of him. By birth a Jew, he became one of the most learned
Christian divines. Ever so many stories were told of him, some true,
some no doubt invented. I saw him often walking to and from the
University to give his lectures in a large fur coat, with high black
polished boots beneath, but showing occasionally as he walked along.
It was told that he once sent for a doctor because he was lame. The
doctor on examining his feet, saw that one boot was covered with mud,
while the other was perfectly clean. The Professor had walked with one
foot on the pavement, with the other in the gutter, and was far too
much absorbed in his ideas to discover the true cause of his
discomfort. He lived with his sister, who took complete care of him
and saw to his wardrobe also. She knew that he wore one pair of
trousers, and that on a certain day in the year the tailor brought him
a new pair. Great was her amazement when one day, after her brother
had gone to the University, she discovered his pair of trousers lying
on a chair near his bed. She at once sent a servant to the Professor’s
lecture-room to inquire whether he had his trousers on. The hilarity
of his class may be imagined. The fact was it was the very day on
which the tailor was in the habit of bringing the new pair of
trousers, which the Professor had put on, leaving his usual garment
behind.
Many more stories of his absent-mindedness were _en vogue_ about Dr.
Neander, but that this man, a pillar of strength to the orthodox in
Germany, who was looked up to as an infallible Pope, should have his
name coupled with that of Strauss certainly gave one a little shock.
Yet it was at Oxford that I pitched my tent, chiefly in order to
superintend the printing of my Rig-veda at the University Press there,
and never dreaming that a fellowship, still less a professorship in
that ancient Tory University, would ever be offered to me.
For me to go to Oxford to get a fellowship or professorship would have
seemed about as absurd as going to Rome to become a Cardinal or a
Pope; and yet in time I was chosen a Fellow of All Souls, and the
first married Fellow of the College, and even a professorship was
offered to me when I least expected it. The fact is, I never thought
of either, and no one was more surprised than myself when I was asked
to act as deputy, and then as full Taylorian Professor; no one could
have mistrusted his eyes more than I did, when one of the Fellows of
All Soul’s informed me by letter that it was the intention of the
College to elect me one of its fellows. My ambition had never soared
so high. I was thinking of returning to Leipzig as a _Privat-docent_,
to rise afterwards to an extraordinary and, if all went well, to an
ordinary professorship.
But after these two appointments at Oxford had secured to me what I
thought a fair social and financial position in England, I did not
feel justified in attempting to begin life again in Germany. I had not
asked for a professorship or fellowship. They were offered me, and my
ambition never went beyond securing what was necessary for my
independence. In Germany I was supposed to have become quite wealthy;
in England people knew how small my income really was, and wondered
how I managed to live on it. They did not suppose that I had chiefly
to depend on my pen in order to live as a professor is expected to
live at Oxford. I could not see anything anomalous in a German holding
a professorship in England. There were several cases of the same kind
in Germany. Lassen (1800-1876), our great Sanskrit professor at Bonn,
was a Norwegian by birth, and no one ever thought of his nationality.
What had that to do with his knowledge of Sanskrit? Nor was I ever
treated as an alien or as intruder at Oxford, at least not at that
early time. As to myself, I had now obtained what seemed to me a small
but sufficient income with perfect independence. The quiet life of a
quiet student had been from my earliest days my ideal in life. Even at
school at Dessau, when we boys talked of what we hoped to be, I
remember how my ideal was that of a monk, undisturbed in his
monastery, surrounded by books and by a few friends. The idea that I
should ever rise to be a professor in a university, or that any career
like that of my father, grandfather, and other members of my family
would ever be open to me, never entered my mind then. It seemed to me
almost disloyal to think of ever taking their places. Even when I saw
that there were no longer any Protestant monks, no Benedictines, the
place of an assistant in a large library, sitting in a quiet corner,
was my highest ambition.
I do not see why it should have been so, for all my relations and
friends occupied high places in the public service, but as I had no
father to open my eyes, and to stimulate my ambition—he having died
before I was four years old—my ideas of life and its possibilities
were evidently taken from my young widowed mother, whose one desire
was to be left alone, much as the world tempted her, then not yet
thirty years old, to give up her mourning and to return to society.
Thus it soon became my own philosophy of life, to be left alone, free
to go my own way, or like Diogenes, to live in my own tub. Here we see
what I call the influence of circumstances, of surroundings, or as
others call it, of environment. This, however, is very different from
atavism, as we shall see presently. Atavism also has been called a
kind of environment, attacking us and influencing us from the past,
and as it were, from behind, from the North in fact instead of the
South, the East, and the West, and from all the points of the compass.
But atavism means really a very different thing, if indeed it means
anything at all.
I must ease my conscience once for all on this point, and say what I
feel about atavism and environment. Environment in the shape of
friends, of locality, and other material circumstances, has certainly
influenced my life very much, and I could never see why such a hybrid
word as environment should be used instead of surroundings or
circumstances. Creatures of circumstances would be far better
understood than creatures of environment; but environment, I suppose,
would sound more scientific. Atavism also is a new word, instead of
family likeness, but unless carefully defined, the word is very apt to
mislead us.
When it is said[4] that children often resemble their grandfathers or
grandmothers more than their immediate parents, and that this
propensity is termed atavism, this does not seem quite correct even
etymologically, for atavus in Latin did not mean father or
grandfather, but at first great-great-great-grandfather, and then
only ancestors; and what should be made quite clear is that this
mysterious atavism should not be used by careful speakers, to express
the supposed influence of parents or even grandparents, but that of
more distant ancestors only, and possibly of a whole family.
[4] _Oxford Dictionary_, s. v.; J. Rennie, _Science of
Gardening_, p. 113.
Many biographers, such is the fashion now, begin their works with a
long account not only of father and mother, but of grandparents and of
ever so many ancestors, in order to show how these determined the
outward and inward character of the man whose life has to be written.
Who would deny that there is some truth, or at least some
plausibility, in atavism, though no one has as yet succeeded in giving
an intelligible account of it? It is supposed to affect the moral as
well as the physical peculiarities of the offspring, and that here,
too, physical and moral qualities often go together cannot be denied.
A blind person, for instance, is generally cautious, but happy and
quite at his ease in large societies. A deaf person is often
suspicious and unhappy in society. In inheriting blindness, therefore,
a man could well be said to have inherited cautiousness; in inheriting
deafness, suspiciousness would seem to have come to him by
inheritance.
But is blindness really inherited? Is the son of a father who has lost
his eyesight blind, and necessarily blind? We must distinguish between
atavistic and parental influences. Parental influences would mean the
influence of qualities acquired by the parents, and directly
bequeathed to their offspring; atavistic influences would refer to
qualities inherited and transmitted, it may be, through several
generations, and engrained in a whole family. In keeping these two
classes separate, we should only be following Weismann’s example, who
denies altogether that acquired qualities are ever heritable. His
examples are most interesting and most important, and many Darwinians
have had to accept his amendment. Besides, we should always consider
whether certain peculiarities are constant in a family or inconstant.
If a father is a drunkard, surely it does not follow that his sons
must be drunkards. Neither does it follow that all the children must
be sober if the parents are sober. Of course, in ordinary conversation
both parental and ancestral influences seem clear enough. But if a
child is said to favour his mother, because like her he has blue eyes
and fair hair, what becomes of the heritage from the father who may
have brown eyes and dark hair? Whatever may happen to the children,
there is always an excuse, only an excuse is not an explanation. If
the daughter of a beautiful woman grows up very plain, the Frenchman
was no doubt right when he remarked, _C’était alors le père qui
n’était pas bien_, and if the son of a teetotaller should later in
life become a drunkard, the conclusion would be even worse. In fact,
this kind of atavistic or parental influence is a very pleasant
subject for gossips, but from a scientific point of view, it is
perfectly futile. If it is not the father, it is the mother; if it is
not the grandmother, it is the grandfather; in fact, family influences
can always be traced to some source or other, if the whole pedigree
may be dug up and ransacked. But for that very reason they are of no
scientific value whatever. They can neither be accounted for, nor can
they be used to account for anything themselves. Even of twins, though
very like each other in many respects, one may be phlegmatic, the
other passionate. Some scientists, such as Weismann and others, have
therefore denied, and I believe rightly, that any acquired characters,
whether physical or mental, can ever be inherited by children from
their parents. Whatever similarity there is, and there is plenty, is
traced back by him to what he calls the germ-plasm, working on
continuously in spite of all individual changes. If that germ-plasm is
liable to certain peculiar modifications in the father or grandfather,
it is liable to the same or similar modifications in the offspring,
that is, if the father could become a drunkard, so could the son, only
we must not think that the _post hoc_ is here the same as the _propter
hoc_. If we compare the germ-plasm to the molecules constituting the
stem or branches of a vine, its grapes and leaves in their similarity
and their variety would be comparable to the individuals belonging to
the same family, and springing from the same family tree. But then the
grape we see would not be what the grape of last year, or the grape
immediately preceding it on the same branch, had made it, though there
can be no doubt that the antecedent possibilities of the new grape
were the same as those of the last. If one grape is blue, the next
will be blue too, but no one would say that it was blue because the
last grape was blue. The real cause would be that the molecules of the
protoplasm have been so affected by long continued generation, that
some of the peculiar qualities of the vine have become constant.
The child of a negro must always be a negro; his peculiarities are
constant, though it may be quite true that the negro and other races
are not different species, but only varieties rendered constant by
immense periods of time. What the cause of these constant and
inconstant peculiarities may be, not even Weismann has yet been able
to explain satisfactorily.
The deafness of my mother and the prevalence of the misfortune in
numerous members of her family acted on me as a kind of external
influence, as something belonging to the environment of my life; it
never frightened me as an atavistic evil. It justified me in being
cautious and in being prepared for the worst, and so far it may be
said to have helped in shaping or narrowing the course of my life.
Fortunately, however, this tendency to deafness seems now to have
exhausted itself. In my own generation there is one case only, and the
next two generations, children and grandchildren of mine, show no
signs of it. If, on the other hand, my son was congratulated when
entering the diplomatic service, on being the son of his father, it is
clear that the difference between inherited and acquired qualities, so
strongly insisted on by Weismann, had not been fully appreciated by
his friends. Besides, my own power of speaking foreign languages has
always been very limited, and I have many times declined the
compliment of being a second Mezzofanti.[5] I worked at languages as a
musician studies the nature and capacities of musical instruments,
though without attempting to perform on every one of them. There was
no time left for acquiring a practical familiarity with languages, if
I wanted to carry on my researches into the origin, the nature and
history of language. My own study of languages could therefore have
been of very little use to me, nor did my son himself perceive such an
advantage in learning to converse in French, Spanish, Turkish, &c. The
facts were wrong, and the theory of atavism perfectly unreasonable as
applied to such a case.
[5] _Science of Language_, vol. i. p. 24 (1861).
If the theory of atavism were stretched so far, it would soon do away
with free will altogether. That heredity has something to do with our
moral character, no one would deny who knows the influence of our
national, nay even of racial character. We are Aryan by heredity; we
might be Negroes or Chinese, and share in their tendencies. Animals
also have their instincts. Only while animals, like serpents for
instance, would never hesitate to follow their innate propensity, man,
when he feels the power of what we may call inherited human instinct,
feels also that he can fight against it, and preserve his freedom,
even while wearing the chains of his slavery. This may have removed
some of Dr. Wendell Holmes’ scruples in writing his powerful story,
_Elsie Venner_, and may likewise quiet the fears of his many critics.
I believe that language also—our own inherited language—exercises
the most powerful influence on our reason and our will, far more
powerful than we are aware of.
A Greek speaking Greek and a Roman speaking Latin would certainly have
been very different beings from the Romance and French descendants of
a Horace or a Cicero, and this simply on account of the language which
they had to speak, whether Greek, Latin, French, or Spanish. We cannot
tell whether the original differentiation of language, symbolized by
the story of the Tower of Babel, took place before or after the racial
differentiation of men. Anyhow it must have taken place in quite
primordial times. Without speaking positively on this point, I
certainly hold as strongly as ever that language makes the man, and
that therefore for classificatory purposes also language is far more
useful than colour of skin, hair, cranial or gnathic peculiarities.
Whether it be true that with every new language we speak we become
new men, certain it is that language prepares for us channels in which
our thoughts have to run, unless they are so powerful as to break all
dams and dykes, and to dig for themselves new beds.
For a long time people would not see that languages can be classified;
and as languages always presuppose speakers of language, these
speakers also can be classified accordingly. It is quite true that
some of these Aryan speakers may in some cases have Negro blood and
Negro features, as when a Negro becomes an English bishop. Conquered
tribes also may in time have learnt to speak the language of their
conquerors, but this too is exceptional, and if we call them Aryas, we
do not commit ourselves to any opinion as to their blood, their bones,
or their hair. These will never submit to the same classification as
their speech, and why should they? Nor should it be forgotten that
wherever a mixture of language takes place, mixed marriages also would
most likely take place at the same time. But whatever confusion may
have arisen in later times in language and in blood, no language could
have arisen without speakers, and we mean by Aryas no more than
speakers of Aryan languages, whatever their skulls or their hair may
have been. An Octoroon, and even a Quadroon, may have blonde waving
hair, but if he speaks English he would be classified as Aryan, if
Berber as a Negro. But who is injured by such a classification? Let
blood and skulls and hair and jaws be classified by all means, but let
us speak no longer of Aryan skulls or Semitic blood. We might as well
speak of a prognathic language.
While fully admitting, therefore, the influence which family,
nationality, race, and language exercise on us, it should be clearly
perceived that habits acquired by our parents are not heritable, that
the sons of drunkards need not be drunkards, as little as the sons of
sober people must be sober. But though biographers may agree to this
in general they seem inclined, to hold out very strongly for what are
called _special talents in certain families_. This subject is
decidedly amusing, but it admits of no scientific treatment, as far as
I can see.
The grandfather of Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy for instance, though
not a composer, was evidently a man of genius, a philosopher of
considerable intellectual capacity and moral strength. The father of
the composer was a rich banker at Berlin, and he used to say: “When I
was young I was the son of the great Mendelssohn, now that I am old, I
am the father of the great Mendelssohn; then what am I?” Even a poor
man to become a rich banker must be a kind of genius, and so far the
son may be said to have come of a good stock. But the great musical
talent that was developed in the third generation both in Felix and
his sisters, failed entirely in his brother, who, to save his life,
could never have sung “God save the Queen.” In the little theatrical
performances of the whole family for which Felix composed the music,
and his sister Fanny (Hensel) some of the songs, the unmusical
brother—was it not Paul?—had generally to be provided with some such
part as that of a night watchman, and he managed to get through his
song with as much credit as the _Nachtwächter_ in the little town of
Germany, where he sang or repeated, as I well remember, in his cracked
voice:
“Hört, ihr Herren, und lasst euch sagen,
Die Glock’ hat zwölf geschlagen;
Wahret das Feuer und auch das Licht,
Dass Keinem kein Schade geschicht.”
“Listen, gents, and let me tell,
The clock struck twelve by its last knell;
Watch o’er the fire and o’er the light
That no one suffer any plight.”
I have known in my life many musicians and their families, but I
remember very few instances indeed, where the son of a distinguished
musician was a great musician himself. If the children take to music
at all they may become very fair musicians, but never anything
extraordinary. The Bach family may be quoted against me, but music,
before Sebastian Bach, was almost like a profession, and could be
learned like any other handicraft.
Nor are the cases of painters being the sons of great painters, or of
poets being the sons of great poets, more numerous. It seems almost as
if the artistic talent was exhausted by one generation or one
individual, so that we often see the sons of great men by no means
great, and if they do anything in the same line as their fathers, we
must remember that there was much to induce them to follow in their
steps without admitting any atavistic influences.
For the present, I can only repeat the conclusion I arrived at after
weighing all the arguments of my friends and critics, namely, to
continue my Recollections much as I began them, to try to explain what
made me what I am, to describe, in fact, my environment; though as my
years advance, and my labours and plans grow wider and wider, I shall,
no doubt, have to say a great deal more about myself than in the
volumes of _Auld Lang Syne_. In fact, my Recollections will become
more and more of an autobiography, and the I and the Autos will appear
more frequently than I could have wished.
In an autobiography the painter is of course supposed to be the same
as the sitter, but quite apart from the metaphysical difficulties of
such a supposition, there is the physical difficulty when the writer
is an old man, and the model is a young boy. Is the old man likely to
be a fair judge of the young man, whether it be himself or some one
else? As a rule, old men are very indulgent, while young men are apt
to be stern and strict in their judgments. The very fact that they
often invent excuses for themselves shows that they feel that they
want excuses. The words of the Preacher, vii. 16: “Be not righteous
over much; neither make thyself over wise: why shouldest thou destroy
thyself? Be not over much wicked, neither be thou foolish: why
shouldest thou die before thy time?” are evidently the words of an old
man when judging of himself or of others. A young man would have
spoken differently. He would have made no allowance; for anything like
compassion for an erring friend is as yet unknown to him. In an
autobiography written by an old man there is therefore a double
danger, first the indulgence of the old man, and secondly the kindly
feeling of the writer towards the object of his remarks.
All these difficulties stand before me like a mountain wall. And it
seems better to confess at once that an old man writing his own life
can never be quite just, however honest he tries to be. He may be too
indulgent, but he may also be too strict and stern. To say, for
instance, of a man that he has not kept his promise, would be a very
serious charge if brought against anybody else. Yet my oldest friend
in the world knows how many times he has made a promise to himself,
and has not only not kept it but has actually found excuses why he did
not keep it. The more sensitive our conscience becomes, the more
blameworthy many an act of our life seems to be, and what to an
ordinary conscience is no fault at all, becomes almost a sin under a
fiercer light.
This changes the moral atmosphere of youth when painted by an old man,
but the physical atmosphere also assumes necessarily a different hue.
Whether we like it or not, distance will always lend enchantment to
the view. If the azure hue is inseparable from distant mountains and
from the distant sky, we need not wonder that it veils the distant
paradise of youth. A man who keeps a diary from his earliest years,
and who as an old man simply copies from its yellow pages, may give us
a very accurate black and white image of what he saw as a boy, but as
in old faded photographs, the life and light are gone out of them,
while unassisted memory may often preserve tints of their former
reality. There is life and light in such recollections, but I am
willing to admit that memory can be very treacherous also. Thus in my
own case I can vouch that whatever I relate is carefully and
accurately transcribed from the tablets of my memory, as I see them
now, but though I can claim truthfulness to myself and to my memory, I
cannot pretend to photographic accuracy. I feel indeed for the
historian who uses such materials unless he has learnt to make
allowance for the dim sight of even the most truthful narrators.
I doubt whether any historian would accept a statement made thirty
years after the event without independent confirmation. I could not
give the date of the battle of Sadowa, though I well remember reading
the full account of it in the _Times_ from day to day. I can of
course get at the date from historical books, and from that kind of
artificial memory which arises by itself without any _memoria
technica_. There is a favourite German game of cards called Sixty-six,
and it was reported that when the French in 1870 shouted _À Berlin_,
the then Crown-Prince who had won the battle of Sadowa, or Königgrätz,
said: “Ah, they want another game of Sixty-six!” that is they want a
battle like that of Sadowa. In this way I shall always remember the
date of that decisive battle. But I could not give the date of the
Crimean battles nor a trustworthy account of the successive stages of
that war. I doubt whether even my old friend, Sir William H. Russell,
could do that now without referring to his letters in the _Times_.
After thirty years no one, I believe, could take an oath to the
accuracy of any statement of what he saw or heard so many years ago.
All then that I can vouch for is that I read my memory as I should the
leaves of an old MS. from which many letters, nay, whole words and
lines have vanished, and where I am often driven to decipher and to
guess, as in a palimpsest, what the original uncial writing may have
been. I am the first to confess that there may be flaws in my memory,
there may be before my eyes that magic azure which surrounds the
distant past; but I can promise that there shall be no invention, no
_Dichtung_ instead of _Wahrheit_, but always, as far as in me lies,
truth. I know quite well that even a certain dislocation of facts is
not always to be avoided in an old memory. I know it from sad
experience. As the spires of a city—of Oxford for instance—arrange
themselves differently as we pass the old place on the railway, so
that now one and now the other stands in the centre and seems to rise
above the heads of the rest, so it is with our friends and
acquaintances. Some who seemed giants at one time assume smaller
proportions as others come into view towering above them. The whole
scenery changes from year to year. Who does not remember the trees in
our garden that seemed like giants in our childhood, but when we see
them again in our old age, they have shrunk, and not from old age
only?
And must I make one more confession? It is well known that George the
Fourth described the battle of Waterloo so often that at last he
persuaded himself that he had been present, in fact that he had won
that battle. I also remember Dr. Routh, the venerable president of
Magdalen College, who died in his hundredth year, and who had so often
repeated all the circumstances of the execution of Charles I, that
when Macaulay expressed a wish to see him, he declined “because that
young man has given quite a wrong account of the last moments of the
king,” which he then proceeded to relate, as if he had been an
eye-witness throughout.
Are we not liable to the same hallucination, though, let us hope, in a
more mitigated form? Have we never told a story as if it were our
own, not from any wish to deceive, but simply because it seemed
shorter and easier to do so than to explain step by step how it
reached us? And after doing that once or twice, is there not great
danger of our being surprised at somebody else claiming the story as
his own, or actually maintaining that it was he who told it to us?
Not very long ago I remember reading in a journal a story of the Duke
of Wellington. His servant had been sent before to order dinner for
him at an out-of-the-way hotel, and in order to impress the landlord
with the dignity of his coming guest, he had recited a number of the
Duke’s titles, which were very numerous. The landlord, thinking that
the Duke of Vittoria, the Prince of Waterloo, the Marquis of Torres
Vedras, and all the rest, were friends invited to dine with the Duke
of Wellington, ordered accordingly a very sumptuous banquet to the
great dismay of the real Duke. This may or may not be a very old and a
very true story; all I know is that much the same thing was told at
Oxford of Dr. Bull, who was Canon of Christ Church, Canon of Exeter,
Prebendary of York, Vicar of Staverton, and lastly, the Rev. Dr. Bull
himself. Dinner was provided for each of these persons, and we are
told that the reverend pluralist had to eat all the dishes on the
table and pay for them. This also may have been no more than one of
the many “Common-roomers” which abounded in Oxford when Common Rooms
were more frequented than they are now. But what I happen to know as a
fact is that Dean Stanley received no less than four invitations to a
hall at Blenheim, addressed A. P. Stanley, Esq., the Rev. A. P.
Stanley, Canon Stanley, Professor Stanley, all evidently copied from
some books of reference.
I may perhaps claim one advantage in trying to describe what happened
to myself in my passage through life. From the earliest days that I
can recollect, I felt myself as a twofold being—as a subject and an
object, as a spectator and as an actor. I suppose we all talk to
ourselves, and say to our better and worse selves, O thou fool! or,
Well done, my boy! Well this inward conversation began with me at a
very early time, and left the impression that I was the coachman, but
at the same time the horse too which he drove and sometimes whipped
very cruelly. And this phase of thought, or rather this state of
feeling, seems soon to have led me on to another view which likewise
dates from a very early time, though it afterwards vanished. As a
little boy, when I could not have the same toys which other boys
possessed, I could fully enjoy what they enjoyed, as if they had been
my own. There is a German phrase, “Ich freue mich in deiner Seele,”
which exactly expressed what I often felt. It was not the result of
teaching, still less of reasoning—it was a sentiment given me and
which certainty did not leave me till much later in life, when
competition, rivalry, jealousy, and envy seemed to accentuate my own I
as against all other I’s or Thou’s. I suppose we all remember how the
sight of a wound of a fellow creature, nay even of a dog, gives us a
sharp twitch in the same part of our own body. That bodily sympathy
has never left me, I suffer from it even now as I did seventy years
ago. And is there anybody who has not felt his eyes moisten at the
sudden happiness of his friends? All this seems to me to account, to a
certain extent at least, for that feeling of identity with so-called
strangers, which came to me from my earliest days, and has returned
again with renewed strength in my old age. The “know thyself,”
ascribed to Chilon and other sages of ancient Greece, gains a deeper
meaning with every year, till at last the I which we looked upon as
the most certain and undoubted fact, vanishes from our grasp to become
the Self, free from the various accidents and limitations which make
up the I, and therefore one with the Self that underlies all
individual and therefore vanishing I’s. What that common Self may be
is a question to be reserved for later times, though I may say at once
that the only true answer given to it seems to me that of the
Upanishads and the Vedanta philosophy. Only we must take care not to
mistake the moral Self, that finds fault with the active Self, for the
Highest Self that knows no longer of good or evil deeds.
Long before I had worked and thought out this problem as the
fundamental truth of all philosophy, it presented itself to me as if
by intuition, long before I could have fathomed it in its metaphysical
meaning. I had just heard of the death of a dear little child, and was
standing in our garden, looking at a rose-bush, covered in summer with
hundreds of rose-buds and rose-flowers. While I was looking I broke
off one small withered bud from the midst of a large cluster of roses,
and after I had done so a question came to me, and I said to myself,
What has happened? Is it only that one small bud is dead and gone, or
have not all the other roses been touched by the breath of death that
fell on it? Have they not all suffered from the death of their sister,
for they all spring from the same stem, they all have their life from
the same source? And if one rose suffers, must not all the others
suffer with it? Then all the buds and flowers of the cluster seemed to
me to become one, as it were a family of roses, and each single bud
seemed but the repetition of the same thing, the manifestation of the
same thought, namely the thought of the rose. But my eyes were carried
still further, and the stem from which the bunch of roses sprang was
lost with other stems in a branch, and it was that branch on which all
the roses of the branchlets and stems depended, and without which they
could not flower or exist. The single roses thus became identified
with the branch from which they had sprung, and by which they lived. I
wondered more and more, and after another look all the branches with
all their branchlets became absorbed in the stem, and the stem was the
tree, and the tree sprang from a seed, or as it is now called, the
protoplasm; but beyond that seed there was nothing else that the eye
could see or the mind could grasp. And while this vision floated
before my eyes I thought of my little friend, and the home from which
she had been broken off, and the same vision which had changed the
rose-bush with all its flowers, and buds, and branchlets, and
branches, into a stem and a tree, and at last into one invisible germ
and seed, seemed now to change my little friend and her brothers and
sisters, her parents too and all her family, into one being which,
like an old oak tree, started from an invisible stem, or an invisible
seed, or from an invisible thought, and that divine thought was man,
as the other divine thought had been rose.
Perhaps I did not see it so fully then as I see it now, and I
certainly did not reason about it. I simply felt that in the death of
my little friend, something of myself had gone, though she was no
relation, but only a stray human friend. We see many things as
children which we cannot see as grown-up men and women, for, as
Longfellow said, “the thoughts of youth are long long thoughts.” Nay,
I feel convinced that He who spoke the parable of the vine had seen
the same vision when He said: “I am the vine, ye are the branches.
Abide in Me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself
except it abide in the vine, no more can ye, except ye abide in Me.”
And it is on this vision, or this parable of the vine, that
immediately afterwards follows the lesson, “Love one another, as I
have loved you.” In loving one another we are in truth loving the
others as ourselves, as one with ourselves; and while we are loving
Him who is the vine, we are loving the branches, ourselves—aye, even
our own little selves.
Such vague visions or intuitions often remain with us for life, but
while they seem to be the same, they vary as we vary ourselves. We
imagine we saw their deepest meaning from the first, but, like a
parable, they gain in meaning every time they come back to us.