This book is a biography, that is to say, an account of the life of a man who was a scholar and a thinker, it is not except incidentally a discussion or evaluation of his work in the fields of knowledge with which his scholarship was concerned But a biography should not be inflicted on a reading public without proper justification, I do not think that a man is entitled to such treatment only on the strength of his position and fame in his own age, unless in addition he played so important and significant a role in history that he remains an element to be reckoned with in understanding the continuing evolution of a particular people or humanity in general; nor unless his personality and activities belong to a type whose presence and functiomng is continuous and umversal, so that no outstanding individual of the type ever loses his relevance to all ages
Whether Max Muller deserves a new biography in the light of such a criterion cannot be discussed without taking note of two indisputable facts about him the first, that he is almost completely forgotten today, and the second, that when he died in 1900 and for thirty years before that he was a world figure Both of these have to be considered, more especially his great contemporaneous reputation
In Britain, which was his adopted country and where he spent all his working life of over fifty years, his name means nothing outside the circle of professional Indologists, linguists and mythologists, and even within it the recollection is dim It is the same in Germany where he was born and brought up, though above all it was he who was responsible for building up the reputation and prestige of the Germans as the most admiring, sympathetic, and profound interpreters of Hindu civilization and spirituality Even m India, where he was a legend and an institution combined, he is now only vaguely remembered as a German intermediary between India and Europe, and Indians hardly remember that if Max Muller was a German, he was equally an Englishman It is only very recently that the cultural projection of western Germany of today has revived his name by calling its centres in the big cities of India Max Mueller Bhavans or Houses Through this the Germans have put the memory and prestige of Max Muller behind their
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cultural propaganda though he was interested only in presenting the rediscovered ancient India, and not Germany, to modern Indians His contemporary position has now to be set against the current eclipse His prestige was as impressive in its geographical range, extending from the Umted States to Japan, as it was by its recognition by all social classes from royalty to common people Witness the reaction to the news of his death He died at half-past eleven in the mor ning of Sunday, October 28, 1900 Immediately, messages of condolence began to pour in to his home at Oxford from all over the world, sent by emperors and kings as well as persons of less exalted worldly status One of the first to come was that from Queen Victoria, herself to die in less than three months She wrote to Mrs Max Muller ‘It is with the truest concern that I learn that your dear and excellent husband passed away today ’ There were also telegrams from her son, the future Edward VII, her daughters, the Empress Frederick and Princess Christian, her grandson, Kaiser William II , and many more royal personages The most touching and intimate among these came from the Queen of Rumania, a German princess by birth and better known under her pen name of Carmen Sylva. She wrote
Last night the King woke me in the first sleep with the sad, sad news Of course, I did not sleep again, thinking of you, and watching with you through this long night, and its loneliness 1 Oh, how I wish I could fly to you, and look once more into that most beautiful face, in which harmony of thought, and love, and noble refinement met, in every curve of the lip, in every line, that had been marked by the intensity of thought and feeling
From an Indian social reformer, Malaban, came the message, ‘All India mourns with you’, and that embodied the feeling of all educated Indians
The funeral took place on November 1 Early in the mormng of that day the coffin was moved from his home to St Mary’s (the University church), and placed in Adam de Brome’s chapel, wheie the mourners assembled Though no invitations had been sent out the large church was entirely filled by people from all walks of life, including representatives of the Queen and the German Emperor The Crown Prince of Siam was also among the mourners. The congregation followed the coffin on foot to the Holywell cemetery, where the body of the scholar, who had come to Oxford as an un-
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known and pool youth fifty-two years before, was laid to rest A friend who was attending the service noticed that a little bird sitting on a branch nearby went on singing all through the service, unscared by the crowd and the noise Remembering that Max Muller was a philologist, one could say that it was like the grammarian’s funeral in the epoch of the Revival of Learning described by Browning
Hail to your purlieus,
All ye highfliers of the feathered race,
Swallows and curlews*
Here’s the top-peak, the multitude below Live, for they can, there ,
This man decided not to Live but to Know —
Bury this man there ?
No 1 yonder sparkle is the citadel’s Circling its summit
Thither our path lies, wind we up the heights
For in that bygone age even the grammatical knowledge of a dead language was the key to a new life Max Muller’s speciality was knowledge of Sanskrit which, though a pioneering study when he was young, had hardened into a narrow academic discipline when he died Yet his funeral was a throw back to an older tradition On the following Sunday memorial services were held in many churches in England, including Westminster Abbey, and the whole world press published editorials and obituary notices These were not just matter-of-fact accounts of his scholarly work, but tributes giving expression to a feeling that an epoch was closing Le Temps of Paris summed up his special contribution to knowledge with the observation Tt is a figure from the heroic age of Oriental and linguistic studies which disappears’, and the Journal des Debats recalled his work in its widest scope and wrote ‘The death of Max Muller not only creates a sadly felt gap in historical and philological studies, but also extinguishes the beacon of light to which over the whole world thinking men turned their eyes ’ In India distinguished scholars like R G Bhandarkar and R C Dutt paid tributes to him Similar interest mixed with concern was also shown during his serious illness the previous yeai Examining a volume of his papers m the Bodleian I found at its beginning a whole sheaf of pink telegram forms* The very first telegram was ‘Sept zy ’99 — To Mrs
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Max Muller I heard with great regret of the serious illness of your husband and am anxious to hear how he is and hoping he is better V R I [Victoria, Regina Imperatrix], Balmoral ? The next telegram was also from her, and the third ran ‘Much grieved to hear how seriously ill your husband is Trust you are able to give me better accounts Albert Edward [Prince of Wales and the future Edward VII] 9 There were many more from royal and other personages But I consider a letter about this illness from an ordinary middleclass Hindu in Madras to be the most significant He wrote
Madras, December 13, 1899
Most respected Sir, Sunday was the mail day, on which English mail letters are delivered at Madras That morning, while I was eagerly expecting the postman, he gave me a card received from you, in which the following lines were written ‘Professor Max Muller is seriously ill and not able to attend to any letters ’ When I saw these lines tears trickled down my cheeks unconsciously When I showed the card to my friends who spend the last days of their life like mine in reading the Bhagavatgitha and some such religious books, they were also very much overpowered with grief
Last night when we were going to Sri Parthasarathy Swami temple as usual for devotions, one thing suggested to me, and that was that I should have some special service performed to God (Sri Parthasarathy Swami, the presiding deity in the temple here) by the temple priest in your name for your complete recovery When I expressed my suggestion to my friends that followed me to the temple they were unanimous m their opinion that it was the best that can be done for a gentleman like you who has sacrificed his health and wealth to the good of India and the Hmdus in particular The temple priest was immediately sent for and we disclosed to him our object He raised many objections to have our object accomplished, and the chief one of his objections was that he can’t offer prayers and enchant mantrams to God in the name of one who is not a Hindu by birth, and if he does so in the name of a Christian he will not only be dismissed from the service of the temple, but will also be excommunicated from his caste But, when one of our friends promised to him to pay ample renumeration for the purpose, he acceded to the request Then the next day each of us subscribed our mite and paid to the priest some rupees
The rest of the letter (which is given by Mrs Max Muller in her biography in a paiaphrased and coirected form) described how they went to the temple the next day with the usual offerings of coconut, flowers, and sacred leaves and had the rite for recovery performed.
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Max Muller’s relations with India and Indians were a major element in his life and an essential part of his vocation So they will have to be described and considered as fully as possible in this book Here I shall quote some general statements One comes from an American writer, Moncure D Conway, who had known him for thirty years and contributed the obituary article in the North American Review In it he wrote ‘Wherever I went I usually met the students and the pundits, and a number of the titled men, and all of these, of whatever caste or sect, regarded Max Muller as the greatest of mankind, and I was charged with messages entreating him to visit India This enthusiasm of the cultured influenced even the illiterate ’
To this I would add the tribute of one of the greatest of modern Indians, Swami Vivekananda, the preacher of neo-Hmduism ‘There are a number of great souls in the West,’ he wrote in Bengali — and I am giving a translation — ‘who undoubtedly are wellwishers of India, but I am not aware of one in Europe who is a greater well-wisher He is not only a well-wisher, but also a deep believer in Indian philosophy and religion Though all through life he has lived with and steeped himself in ancient Sanskrit literature the India of the Professoi’s imagination is not simply that which resounded with the chanting of the Vedas and from which sacrificial smoke rose to the sky he also is ever alert to whatever in the way of new developments is happening in every corner of India and keeps himself well-posted about them ’
I could illustrate the nature of Max Muller’s influence on India even better by giving a humbler example, for instance, how as a child I came to know about him My father was not a highly educated man in the formal sense, for he had received only a school education and that too in the backwaters of East Bengal and not in Calcutta, the centre of modern Bengali culture None the less, it was he who explained to me how Max Muller had established that our languages and the European languages belonged to the same family, that our words, pita , mata, duhita , etc , were the same as the English words, ‘father’, ‘mother’, ‘daughter’, etc , that Sanskrit Dyaus Pitr and the Greek Zeus Pater were identical, and that we Hindus and the Europeans were both peoples descended from the same original stock.
This leads me to Max Muller’s position and influence in the West. It could be expected that he would impinge on the learned
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world, be in personal communication with front-rank scholars in many lines, and also that he would receive attention from men and women interested in things of the mind But his influence overflowed into very much wider areas, and indeed they ramified beyond the field of scholarship into the sphere of public affairs, and beyond that even, as in India, into the interests of common people Among his friends, acquaintances, or correspondents in England alone were literary figures like Macaulay, Tennyson, Thackeray, Ruskm, Browning, Matthew Arnold, and political figures like Gladstone, the Duke of Argyll, Lord Northbrooke, Lord Granville, Lord Stratford de Radcliffe, the Marquis of Salisbury, Lord Curzon, and among ecclesiastical personalities there was, to mention only one name, Archbishop Tait This list wholly ignores the wide circles of his friends and acquaintances in Europe and America
No contrast could be more striking than that between the contemporary fame of Max Muller and its posthumous decline, and this by itself might inspire a moralizing biography to demonstrate the vanity of fame I would not admit that this would be more shallow than airing intellectual conceit towards men of the past out of uncritical satisfaction with the present But historically neither would carry us very far The reputation of Max Muller and its eclipse have to be correlated with his intellectual function so as to bring out the real significance of his life But scholars, scientists and historians belong to the times in which they worked, and if any new biographies are to be written of them these must either show what historical role they played in the development of the subjects they dealt with, or illustrate the particular incidence of a general human phenomenon
A life of Max Muller can be written from both points of view Of course, the illustrations I have given of the kind of fame he had and its range do not by themselves prove the value of his researches and ideas To be admired in this way may be regarded as being nothing better than a popular fetish Some of his rivals in scholarship did at times rate him as nothing more important, and made the kind of reputation he enjoyed the ground for denying his scholarship But his popular fame, so far as it could be related with his specialized scholarship, was only the penumbra of a hard core
One of the ironies provided by specialized learning is that though only a specialist can pronounce a competent judgement on a fellowworker, it is rare to get a fair judgement from him. It is always
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possible to find minor mistakes in the works of the greatest scholars, and a rival scholar can always dismiss him as worthless on the strength of these mistakes But Max Muller’s position and reputation were not that of a specialized scholar, he was an intellectual playing a part in the mental history of his times by making people aware of new ideas and extending their view to new horizons His fame spread out from the scholarly field to the lay world like that of Darwin or Einstein, but with a stronger and wider impingement which bore practical results in some countries
This standing becomes still more remarkable when one considers Max Muller’s own outlook on life Generally such fame as he had, comes only to men of action, religious, moral, or political preachers, 1 e , those men of ideas who provide driving power for action But Muller disavowed both roles His view of his own life was set down by him in very clear language at the very end of his autobiography
I have never been a doer [he wrote in it] Many people would call me an idle, useless, and indolent man, and though I have not wasted many hours of my life, I cannot deny the charge that I have neither fought battles, nor helped to conquer new countries, nor joined in any syndicate to roll up a fortune I have been a scholar, a Stubengelehrter , and mild tout * Much as I admired Ruskm when I saw him with his spade and wheelbarrow, encouraging and helping his undergraduate friends to make a new road from one village to another, I never myself took to digging, and shovelling, and carting Nor could I agree with him, happy as I felt in listening to him, when he said ‘What we think, or what we know, or what we believe, is in the end of little consequence The only thing of consequence, to my mmd, is what we do 5 My view of life has always been the very opposite What we do, or what we build up, has always seemed to me of little consequence Even Nineveh is now a mere desert of sand, and Ruskm’s new road also has long since been worn away The only thing of consequence, to my mmd, is what we think, what we know, what we believe
In theory, he equally rejected the role of a man of ideas as the priest behind the warrior
I cannot claim [he further observed], to have been a man of action in the sense in which Carlyle was one in England, or Emerson in America They were men who in their books were constantly teaching and preaching ‘Do this*’ they said, ‘Do not do that*’ The Jewish prophets
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did much the same, and they are not considered to have been useless men, though they did not make bricks, or fight battles like Jehu But the poor Stubengelehrter has not even that comfort I felt satisfied when my work led me to a new discovery, whether it was the discovery of a new continent of thought, or of the smallest desert island in the vast ocean of truth ’
Nothing could be more free from ambiguity None the less Max Muller did intervene in practical affairs, both political and social But as a definition of his major intellectual vocation his words were true, and his wide fame was based mainly, not on his involvement in practical questions, but on his work in the scholarly field Therefore his life has a bearing on a very large and important question Can a man who has deliberately chosen to devote himself to the pursuit of knowledge qua knowledge, and to ideas qua ideas, ever hope to make an impact on the minds of men in general? Max Muller’s life would show that ideas do travel from the scholar’s study over the wide world of the mind For this demonstration alone his life would be revealing
A life of Max Muller is also justified if it can show what the scholarly life and the scholar’s personality really are Those who are not familiar with either tend to take too simple a view of both They assume that life runs a straight and a tranquil course whereas even when there is a strong sense of direction in it, it can be as winding as a river running to the sea Writing this life at Oxford I cannot forget that in order to go to London by tram I have to cross the Thames six times The life of an Oxford don might not be less winding
As to the scholar’s personality, it is neither less complex nor less varied than that of poets I would even say that’ scholars are more varied in type than are poets The Renaissance humanists were not less colourful than the courtesans of their times The fact is that scholarship is a matter of temperament As I have written in my autobiography ‘The greater part of the scholar’s metier is the capacity for experiencing the emotion of scholarship Without this there is no genuine scholarship but only a juggling with books for the sake of making money in a small way, or a career of sorts ’ It is impossible to understand Max Muller’s adherence to the scholarly life without assuming a temperamental compulsion behind it Indeed Max Muller, who was often regarded as a very Germanic pedant by those who did not know him, was looked upon even by the very
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temperamental Oxford dons of his times as a very temperamental person In any case he, with all his individuality, is an example of a certain type of scholar-thinker, and this type recurs. Therefore it never loses interest or the challenge to understanding
Last of all, the life of Max Muller as lived by him faces us with an absolutely fundamental question, to which I shall certainly try to give an answer It is this Is the life of a scholar-thinker worth living ? It is no use dismissing this question by taking for granted the scholar’s role in a civilized society Most of our incomprehension of life comes from not facing up to this sort of question, for disregarding Plato’s profound maxim that the unexammed life — anexatastos bios — is not worth living
Just to accept the incidence of the scholarly life as a necessary part of civilization is hardly better than accepting motor-cars as a phenomenon which must be accepted Perhaps, in our age scholarly activities in the universities all over the world have assumed a character which makes scholars provide grist to a colossal mill turning out information as consumer goods, and these multiply themselves in obedience to their own Parkinson’s Law But that does not make an understanding, evaluation, or validation of the scholarly life less needed than the administrator’s life in the modem bureaucracy
So I have always put to myself the question of the basic significance of all lives I have seen, come in contact with, or read about many of the highest of my countrymen — Tagore, Gandhi 01 Nehru At the death of each of these men I have been terrified by the sudden onset of a conviction that their lives ended as ghastly tragedies and were not very far from that when they were living Again, at the death of many of my contemporaries who in their careers achieved a worldly success which has never come my way nor will, I have asked — What did they gam which I should have liked to have had and have lost ? In each case I had to justify their life by faith, and hardly evei by reasoning But for me it was impossible to avoid the question
I have considered it in connexion with the life of European scholar-thinkers, and above all Karl Marx Did his ideas contribute anything to the undei standing of human life or to enhancing its value ? Or was he only the priest and propagator of a cult more bloody than that of our Kali or of the Aztec war god Huitzilopochtli, to be himself dragged to the altar of his own cult as a sacrificial beast fattened in the British Museum ?
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Max Muller put forward his ideas as explanations of some of the deepest facts of life — religion, mythology, language Neither he nor anybody else has been able to say the final word on any of these But at all events, his theories, provisional as they were bound to be, touched on universal and timeless interests The question is whether these have that amount of relative or absolute value which makes any life-long pursuit of them worthwhile
I am bound in this book to attempt an answer to this question But it has to come out of the book as a whole, and even then only by implication To close this introduction I shall set down what my feeling about his life has been while I have been writing this biography I have felt that it was as tragic in one way as it was successful m another This biography should bring out the grandeur et misere de la me savante as Alfred de Vigny’s stories brought out the grandeur et servitude de la vie mihtaire
I would, of course, say that of any scholar or man of action who has played a part in history At many moments a man who feels deeply about life is seized with a conviction, terrifying though it is, that the significance of life and its vanity are almost equally matched But perhaps we should expect nothing else Significance of life must be found in grains after sifting the immense amount of chaff of insignificance which covers it The really unintelligent reaction is to be clever and blase, and not to be excited by the gram and saddened by the chaff