My Autobiography Part 1

My Autobiography.

by F. Max Muller.

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 ma.n.u.script 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 cla.s.sical; 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 Ruckert, 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 circ.u.mstances 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 t.i.tle 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 ma.n.u.script 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 repet.i.tions. 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 ma.n.u.script 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 att.i.tude 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 Inst.i.tute, and as a Delegate of the Clarendon Press.

With reference to the ill.u.s.trations, 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 f.a.n.n.y, 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 MuLLER.

OXFORD, _January_, 1901.

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 a.s.sured, pa.s.s through life without ever knowing from their looking-gla.s.s 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 fe_; 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 pa.s.sage through life. As in describing the course of a river, we cannot do better than to describe the sh.o.r.es 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 sh.o.r.es with their herds, their cottages, and churches, describe their reflected image on the pa.s.sing 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 pa.s.sed 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 circ.u.mstances 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 ma.n.u.script 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 Pensee 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 a.s.syrian 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, amba.s.sadors and ministers, and could hardly understand what I was driving at with my Sanskrit ma.n.u.scripts, 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 circ.u.mstances were of great importance. They were circ.u.mstances 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 circ.u.mstances, 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.