Chips From a German Workshop
By ,M. A., Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. 2 Vols. New York : Chas. Scribner & Co. 1869.
WE may rejoice when Max Müller passes from those problems in comparative philology which interest the scholar, to those higher problems of comparative mythology which have value for the whole human race. There is no special story so important, after all, as that which enables us to do justice to the religious aspirations of man ; and as for this purpose one must first be a philologist, or at least hold a philologist by the hand, it is a great thing to secure a guide so wise and gentle as Max Müller. In addition to his natural gifts, he has had the inestimable advantage of learning in Germany how to study, and in England how to write. He has thus an almost unique combination of learned thought and clear expression; and he adds the crowning merit of a freshness so hearty that twenty years of Oxford have not extinguished it.
These papers are a series of studies on special topics, published from time to time in compliance with the desire of Bunsen, who suggested their title, and to whose memory they are inscribed. The first volume, which is the more important, comprises “Essays on the Science of Religion ”; but that title might, without much stretch of meaning, be applied to them all.
It is evident on every page that Max Müller has come to the study of religions through his study of languages, just as inevitably as an entomologist becomes also a botanist. He finds at every step the ties which connect the two. “ Missionaries are apt to look upon all other religions as something totally distinct from their own, as formerly they used to describe the languages of barbarous nations as something more like the twitterings of birds than the articulate speech of men. The Science of Language has taught us that there is order and wisdom in all languages, and even the most degraded jargons contain the ruins of former greatness and beauty. The Science of Religion, I hope, will produce a similar change in our views of barbarous forms of faith and worship.” (1. 21.)
Again, lie points out that such writers as Maurice and Hardwick class religions in very much the rude way in which languages were classed during the last century ; merely geographically, as Asiatic or European ; or chronologically, as ancient or modern; or according to their comparative dignity, as sacred or profane, classical or illiterate. Now the comparative philologist ignores all these divisions, and classifies languages genealogically; and so the Science of Religion, as Max Müller calls it, will one day deal impartially, he thinks, with the religions of the world.
The study of languages necessarily came first; and it was the discovery of Sanskrit on which that and the study of religions were alike based. A century ago there was hardly a scholar in the world who could have translated a line of the sacred books of the Brahmans, the Magians, or the Buddhists. The very existence of these books was doubted, and of course no attempt was made to understand the religious position of those millions of the human race who lived and died by their teachings. Now large portions of these writings are deciphered and published; but even now the study of their meaning is in its infancy, and the earliest translations do as little justice to their originals, as does Sale’s version of the Koran when we compare it with Lane’s. Thus Eugène Burnouf was able to show the utter worthlessness of those “ Sacred and Historical Books of Ceylon” which are to be found in many of our libraries. It seems that they were sifted through a series of languages and spoiled in the process.
It is the basis of Max Müller’s creed that “what they [men] contemptuously call natural religion is in reality the greatest gift that God has bestowed on the children of man.” (I. 32.} “ Every religion, even the most imperfect and degraded, has something that ought to be sacred to us, for there is in all religions a secret yearning after the true though unknown God. Whether we see the Papua squatting in dumb meditation before his fetich, or whether we listen to Firdusi exclaiming, ‘The height and the depth of the whole world have their centre in thee, O my God! I do not know thee what thou art: but I know that thou art what thou alone canst be,’ — we ought to feel that the place whereon we stand is holy ground.” (I. 30.)
He frankly recognizes that what he has to say will meet with opposition from many sincere persons. “To those, no doubt, who value the tenets of their religion as the miser values his pearls and precious stones, thinking their value lessened if pearls and stones of the same kind are found in other parts of the world, the Science of Religion will bring many a rude shock; but to the true believers, truth, wherever it appears, is welcome, nor will any doctrine seem the less true or the less precious because it was seen, not only by Moses or Christ, but likewise by Buddha or Lao-tse.”
There is great variety in these essays; and the author’s wide erudition draws materials from “ folk-lore ” and nursery tales, as well as from the Vedas and the “ White Lotus of the Good Law.” He shows everywhere the greatest sincerity and truthfulness, with a rare absence of special pleading. He freely admits, for instance, that the first verb in the Book of Genesis (barâ) does not and cannot mean a creation out of nothing, but implies merely “ fashioning or arranging,” all else being a modern perversion. (I. 131.) Indeed he says explicitly, that “ greater violence is done by successive interpreters to sacred literature than to any other relics of ancient literature,” because “ the simplest phrases are tortured and mangled, till at last they are made to yield their assent to ideas most foreign to the minds of the authors.” (I. 131.)
Though Max Müller has been in England long enough to acquire a tinge of wholesome worldliness, and to regard the British system of castes as essential to a healthy society, he still is not quite an Englishman. He has that good average style which we learn to prize in English books, though he has also its usual accompaniment, a shrinking from the graces of rhetoric, as if they were something French and debilitating. This may do no harm, but the affair grows more serious when he carries the whim further, as in the following: “ Sense is after all the great test of translation. We must feel convinced that there was good sense in these poems, otherwise mankind would not have taken the trouble to preserve them; and if wc cannot discover good sense in them it must be either our fault, or the words as we now read them were not the words uttered by the ancient prophets of the world.” (II. 123.) What but this method produces that torturing and mangling of phrases which has just excited his wrath ? It is by this plausible process of clarification that Cousin undertakes to dispose of all human thought in bis Histoire de la Philosophie. Fancy a man’s undertaking to translate Plotinus or the Parmenides On this Anglo-Saxon method of abolishing all the cloudy passages, or some future editor of Emerson substituting a Sphinx-made-easy for the current version ! Shall a German, of all men, dispute the authenticity of the text, whenever a poet goes up into the clouds ?
Sometimes, again, he manifests a kind of surprise at very common thoughts, and this leads to the suspicion that his mind may have its own narrownesses after all. Thus in speaking of the Brahmanic theory that there must be an infallible priesthood to interpret an infallible book, he says, “ This is a curious argument and not without some general interest,” — as if it were not the argument on which every intelligent Roman Catholic in great part rests his faith. Possibly the sects and sub-sects around him are a little too near for the focus of his spy-glass, but it certainly brings out magnificently all the regions of greater distance, resolves many a nebula of doubt, and shows the starry heavens in exceeding beauty.
Electrotyped and Printed at the University Press, Cambridge, by Welch, Bigelow, & Co.