Philologist, was born 6th December 1823, at Dessau, where his father, Wilhelm Müller (1794–1827), lyric poet, was ducal librarian. He studied at Dessau, Leipzig, and Berlin, devoting himself to Sanskrit; and his translation of the “Hitopadesa” appeared in 1844. In Paris he began (1845), at the instigation of Burnouf, to prepare an edition of the Rig-Veda, coming to England in 1846 to examine the MSS. in the East India House and the Bodleian; and the East India Company commissioned him (1847) to edit it at their expense (6 vols. 1849–74; new ed. 1890). For a time Taylorian professor of Modern Languages at Oxford, he was in 1866 appointed professor there of Comparative Philology, a study he did more than any one else to promote in England. He has published “The Languages of the Seat of War in the East” (1854), “Comparative Mythology” (1856), “History of Sanskrit Literature” (1859), “Science of Language” (1861–63), “Science of Religion” (1870), “Chips from a German Workshop” (1868–75), “Origin and Growth of Religion” (Hibbert Lectures, 1878), “Biographical Essays” (1883), “The Science of Thought” (1887), “Biographies of Words” (1888), “Natural, Physical, Anthropological, and Psychical Religion” (Glasgow Gifford Lectures, pub. 1889–93), “Vedanta Philosophy” (1894), and “Science of Mythology” (1897)—not to speak of “Deutsche Liebe” and “Auld Lang Syne” (1899). He edited the “Sacred Books of the East.” A foreign member of the French Institute, knight of the Ordre pour le Mérite, commander of the Legion of Honour (1896), LL.D. of Cambridge, Dublin, Edinburgh, and Bologna, and in 1896 was made a P.C. He died 28th October 1900. See his “Literary Recollections.” His widow edited his “Life and Letters” (1902).

Personal

  His marriage to Miss Grenfell, by which he became connected with the families of Charles Kingsley and of Froude, served only to widen and render more intimate the circle of literary and professional friends which has been so characteristic of Müller’s life from the first. In Leipzig, Hermann, Haupt, and Brockhaus; in Berlin, Alexander von Humboldt and Boeckh; in Paris, Burnouf; in England, Thackeray, Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, Clough, Jowett, Ruskin,—and indeed almost every one of prominence in scientific and literary affairs,—have been his friends or have been helpful to his fame. This argues exceptional gifts of heart and person, as well as of intellect. His strong and beautiful face, now crowned with a wealth of snowy hair, shines with eager intelligence and the sweetness of thorough kindliness.

  I can imagine a stranger on first seeing him, especially if in university or court dress, associating some hauteur with his erect mien, his handsome, courtly look, and a certain military air characteristic of most high-born Germans. He was a very peculiar man: his virility was expressed in his ruddy face and sparkling eye, and some ancestral huntsman survived in him to such an extent that when on a walk with a friend he would at times unconsciously point his cane as if it were a spear, levelling it to his eye. The cane was pointed at nothing, unless at some point emphasized in discussion, wherein sweetness of speech was always his enforcement. Max Müller was a man even of humility; he listened to the humblest person addressing him with a strict attentiveness; he looked up to some who were really his inferiors. For his great contemporaries his love and reverence was boundless.

  To the unlearned world at large he was the personification of philological scholarship—which he knew how to render accessible to his public in inimitably simple and charming style. There was no domain of philosophy, mythology or religion that he left untouched or unmodified by his comprehensive researches, and the science of language, which is the greatest scholastic glory of the German nation, would appear, judging from his books alone, to have received in him its final incarnation and Messianic fulfilment. There was no national or international dispute of modern times, ever so remotely connected with philological questions, but his ready pen was seen swinging in the thick of the combat, and his Sanskrit roots made to bear the burden of a people’s destiny. He was the recipient of more academic honors, orders, titles, royal and imperial favors, perhaps, than any other scholar since Humboldt, and he bore the greatness that was thrust upon him with the grace and dignity of a born aristocrat. Many were the pummelings he received from the hands of his less favored but more plodding colleagues; yet their buffets of ink but served to throw his Titanic figure into greater relief, and to afford him an opportunity by his delicate, insidious irony to endear himself still more to his beloved public. Apart from his great and sound contributions to the cause of learning and thought, which none will deny, Max Müller’s indisputably greatest service was to have made knowledge agreeable,—nay, even fashionable,—and his proudest boast was that when delivering his lectures on the Science of Language at the Royal Institution, Albermarle street was thronged with the crested carriages of the great, and that not only “the keen dark eyes of Faraday,” “the massive face of the Bishop of St. David’s,” but even the countenances of royalty shone out upon him from his audiences.

  Being a passionate smoker, he, on his part, could not pardon me, in a jocose manner, for being, and always having been, strongly averse to the stink-giftige Rauchkraut, as tobacco has been called by counterblast men. He often forgot this peculiarity of mine, and again offered me cigars…. In society, among friends, he easily unbent, comporting himself with as much pleasant joviality as simplicity; a true sign of real intellectual greatness. At table, where he showed himself a connoisseur of good wine, he was easily disposed to humorous remarks; sometimes with a dash of sarcasm of the milder kind. All possible things in science and politics were discussed on the Welsh Island and in Oxford, from questions of ethnology, of language, of history and literature to German affairs and the condition of Turkey, where his son at that time occupied a post in the Embassy…. Max Müller was not cut out for a politician. It is a pity that the cloud of obloquy which thus suddenly overshadowed his name should have dimmed the lustre of his renown near the very end of his laborious life.

  Blessings to you! I was in the holy city of Benares when I received the mournful news of the departure of your beloved husband, the illustrious scholar, from this plane of action to another life in the evolution of existence. So useful a life, indefatigable in the search after truth, one meets only after long intervals. Personally your late husband was kindness personified, and he aided my labours in the cause of eternal truth. When I was yet in my teens I was brought under the influence of his writings, and I have been a reader of his works since 1883. In obedience to nature’s law, the physical body of the illustrious individuality known as Professor Max Müller has ceased to exist, but his name will continue to exist in influencing future generations. I now offer the deepest sympathy of all Buddhists in your bereavement; and I repeat the noble Words of our Lord Buddha, which he uttered 2,489 years ago: “Do not grieve at my passing away, since it is natural to die.”

  It may be mentioned here that Max Müller’s library, consisting of about 13,000 volumes, besides eighty-one valuable Sanskrit MSS., and several finely illustrated books, was, in accordance with his wish, sold en bloc, and bought by a rich Japanese nobleman, Baron Iwasaki, at the instance of Professor Takakuse, and presented to the University of Tokio, where a hall, to be called the “Max Müller Library” is being erected to contain it. Nothing could be more in accordance with his own wishes.

General

  The giant in the old story, when he was shown the champion seven feet high, swaddled in baby clothes, went off in dismay at the assurance that a father of proportionate bigness was expected home presently. This is something like the effect that the present volumes [“Chips from a German Workshop”], title and contents taken together, may produce upon many readers. They are full of condensed matter of so high a quality that the remark comes naturally, “if these are the chips, what must the block be?” The editing of the Rig-Veda has been Max Müller’s twenty years’ labour. And an estimate of the difficulty and importance of this colossal task is perhaps not unfairly given by inspecting the incidental work which has grown up around it…. Treating of ancient religion, philosophy, mythology, and culture in general, their central point is still the Veda, and the records of the early Aryan race as connected with it. The course of this great people can now be traced onward to the highest civilization of our own times…. No doubt many who open these volumes well remember their first reading of the essay on Comparative Mythology when it appeared ten years and more ago in the “Oxford Essays,” and gave them their first glimpse of the beautiful theory of mythologic development which the Sanskirtists were then just beginning to establish in some settled form…. When we come to discuss Comparative Mythology, we find the argument in a very different state. It is true that no one, however prejudiced, could have read Max Müller’s “Oxford Essay” without admitting that its views have an element of truth in them, but the question is not yet nearly settled how far the new ground is safe. English readers who compare, for instance, the books of Mr. Cox and Mr. Kelley, will be apt to think that, while such disagreement even on vital points is possible, they had better not pin their faith to any exponent.

  We may regret that the work (a collection of essays and reviews printed at intervals since 1853) should at once attract us by the writer’s marvellous extent of knowledge, keen insight, and reverential sympathy, and disappoint us by the fragmentary form, and often tantalizing brevity of the articles. As a rule, such collections need a careful sifting and revision, and the absence of such a process is sure to lead sometimes to a needless repetition, cometimes to seeming inconsistency. In the first volume of these essays, e. g., the religious statistics of mankind are given no less than three times (pp. 23, 160, 215), and the elementary facts connected with the mythology of the Vedas meet us again, until they become as familiar friends. But when we recollect what has been the writer’s main employment, that these “Chips of a German Workshop” represent the leisure half-hours of one whose day-work has been to edit and translate the Vedas, we can but look on them with ever-increasing admiration. As “the gleaning of the grapes of Ephraim” was to “the vintage of Abiezer,” so are these “Chips” to the whole stock-in-trade of many a timber firm enjoying a high reputation in England, France or Germany.

  No one living probably is better qualified than Prof. Müller for the task which he has here undertaken. His speciality, the study of the Veda, sets him in the very heart of the myths and creeds and rites of the Indo-European peoples, and hardly any one has studied them more deeply, or in a more original spirit, than he. The circle of Vedic divinities and their Greek correspondents are his most engrossing theme; but he is hardly less full upon the subject of the Zend-Avesta; while the monotheism of the Semites, the dry utilitarian precepts of Confucius, the dizzying doctrines of Buddhism, and the simple beliefs of half-civilized American aborigines, receive also not a little of his attention. Such trustworthy and comprehensive information, so attractively presented within so brief compass, is not elsewhere to be found by the student of the general religious history of mankind…. The manner and style of these essays of Müller, as of his larger and more serious works heretofore published are worthy of high praise. No English author in this department has a greater power as a writer of English than he; none writes with more fervid thought or more genuinely eloquent expression. Of course, the essays are not of entirely equal merit in these respects; and it should be especially noted that one who commences his perusal of the work with the first essay in the first volume, the author’s lecture at Leeds on the Veda, will gain a too unfavorable idea of the whole, of which it is the heaviest and least attractive portion, though replete with valuable information.

  Mere “chips” though they be, fragmentary essays like these contain much of the most vital discussion of the day…. That stage in language which he calls the mythological is of the first importance in the history of language, and was indispensable to the formation of mythology—of much, too, which is not mythology. The recognition and illustration of this stage, and of its bearing on the development of myths, is one of the author’s great services to scholarship and thought; but it will not explain everything that we call mythology. It appears to us, therefore, that Professor Müller nowhere shows sufficient appreciation of the part which the religious sense must have had in the creation of mythology—nowhere recognizes that earnest faith in the dæmonic powers of nature which lay at the bottom of the ancient polytheism. Even in the fine passage in the first essay, in which he treats of the personification of abstract nouns and the powers of nature, it seems to us that he inverts the true process, and looks to language for an explanation, rather than to the instructive beliefs of the human mind.

  His position, indeed, has been one that would have been apt to turn a much stronger head. Early making England his home, he brought to the students of that country a realizing sense that there was something in language beside the writing of Greek and Latin verses. It was to them the revelation of a new religion. It was not that others had not before entertained and expressed the same ideas. He was the first to make them attractive and operative,—the first who united knowledge of the subject with the power of popular exposition,—who possessed the faculty of clothing the driest details with the freshness and interest of living reality. The apostle of a new faith, he became identified in that country with the faith itself; an attack upon him was looked upon as an attack upon it. It would certainly have been strange, if the adulation of which he has been made the object, the indisposition to doubt, or the inability to contradict his most questionable utterances had not made him self-confident and careless. Secure in the ignorant and unsuspecting devotion of the English public, he felt himself for a long time under no necessity of taking any apparent notice of the severe sifting which his views were receiving in other quarters, though the bitterness of his late expression shows how deeply the hostile criticism must have rankled.

  Another eminent philologist, entering the discussion now rife upon the relations of English writing and English speech, had given his adhesion to the scheme for a thorough change in the writing of the English language. Max Müller, in a paper on “Spelling,” recently published in the “Fortnightly Review,” puts forth views upon the subject than which none could be more radical, and which, if put in act and force, would not so much reform our present spelling as uproot it, overturn it, and sweep it away. His argument, like all his writings, commands admiration by its ability, its candor, its good faith, and its common sense. The very extremity of the change which he favors is a claim upon the respect even of those who cannot agree with him; for it shows the sincerity of the man and the logical clearness of his mind.

  The name of Professor Max Müller is now by common consent enrolled with the names of famous Englishmen. Max Müller has adopted England as his home, and England has quietly annexed his reputation. He has approached the history of man’s development, by the study of man’s speech. He has opened a new and most important road for the student. In his hands philology ceases to be a dry science of words, and becomes quickened into a living teacher of history. Max Müller has contributed to various departments of thought, and has proved himself a charming writer, who can invest even the least attractive subject with an absorbing interest.

  Although he has excited strong opposition, standing almost alone among academic men, his influence has been second to that of few. The number of sermons that have been constructed from his “Chips from a German Workshop” would be almost beyond estimate—and so much the better. Thus his ideas and rare information have been scattered broadcast over the Anglo-Saxon world. He has been looked upon as a dangerous Radical by some, and by others he has been considered the enemy of progress; but he has held his course consistently to his own thought and belief, for forty years, without swerving from the ideal of high-minded scholarship, which he set for himself in the beginning.

  To do precise justice to Max Müller as a scholar is not easy. His genial manner as a lecturer, his clear style as a writer made for him a host of devout admirers forty years ago amongst the thoughtful public of this country, while in India his name for a long term of years has been one to conjure with, and some of his quite recent essays show a sympathy and just appreciation of native character from which most Anglo-Indians may learn something. Consequently, although he himself derided “Mezzofantiasis,” many of the admiring public credited him with linguistic gifts far surpassing those of the great cardinal, and some of the notices in the daily papers this week have shown that the idea survives among journalists. On the other hand, the severe condemnation which he received from equals in his own kindred lines of research is hard to explain away. Even if one grants that his attitude towards fellow-scholars left something at times to be desired, Orientalists at least know that one can hardly brush aside the views of men like Böhtlingk or of Whitney (each of whom devoted a separate work to detailed refutation of Müller’s statements) as mere diatribes of disappointed rivals. Something, no doubt, was due to the unprogressive nature of his scholarship. This may be seen in observing his attitude, uncompromising to the last, towards the anthropological school in their contribution to Vedic interpretation. Contrast this with a recent dictum of Professor Oldenberg, his friend and coadjutor in Vedic translations, who has characterized this contribution as “eine Entdeckung höchster Bedeutung.” So, too, in the realms of thought and mind most specialists consider that he overrated the influence of language. One of his greatest merits was the clear, lucid, captivating style in which he clothed his thoughts. He could make a dull subject interesting where many of his detractors only made an interesting subject dull.

  Müller’s fame waned before his death, and for the last ten years no critic has been too humble to speak of him lightly in his capacity of linguist and mythologist. But the master of a generation ago cannot be dismissed without the meed of praise due to his ability and to the work actually accomplished by him. It is true that he was at his best as an interpreter. His unrivalled style, his enthusiasm, his eloquence in a domain distinguished for arid research, made him and his field known to those who would otherwise have had no interest in the line which he represented…. In a word, Müller, even as a middle-man between the inner shrine and the outer world, deserved well of two generations. In his matured strength he was an inspiration, and he always aided his chosen science by his poetic insight and suggestiveness, even when the cause for which he fought was wrong. Regarded solely from the material side, the benefit he conferred upon Sanskrit studies in winning means for others as well as for himself to prosecute their labors, is not a small item in the score of good he must have entered to his credit.

  He had, above all, the gift of contagion, of personal and moral magnetism, which came not only from his faith in his subject, but far more from the warmth and fervor of his imagination, from the riches of a profoundly poetical nature. There is something in this peroration which recalls the moral earnestness and elevation of Gladstone, and establishes another link between these two great minds…. By his studies in the “Veda,” the “Avesta,” the Pali and Sanskrit texts of Buddhism, Max Müller was well qualified to penetrate the dark places of Oriental thought; his philosophical sense, always keen, had been whetted by his work on Kant’s great critique. His long years of research into the relationships and growth of language had trained him to see the same mind working throughout all history, the same human heart clothing in words its hopes, its fears, its aspirations. He was profoundly convinced of the brotherhood of all the races of man—a kinship, not of animals, but of living souls. We can see in all this the preparation for his third and greatest undertaking—a task so great that many years have yet to run before its fruits are fully ripe; before the minds of the majority are ripe enough to comprehend its purpose.

  In all his writings Max Müller never lost sight of the religious bearing of the subject which he treated or of the importance of the studies in which he was interested for the history of the religious thought of the world. Not only was the study of comparative religion enriched by his hand, but philosophers also owe him a debt because of his accomplishment of the difficult task of translating Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason.” Those who are acquainted with Kant’s metaphysical thought, best know the problem which was implied in rendering the German into the English. And one further contribution in the philosophical line must be recorded. Almost his last piece of work was “The Six Systems of Indian Philosophy,” published in 1898–99. In this solid volume of over six hundred pages he has given the best general presentation that we have, as yet, of the whole system of Indian speculative thought.

  Max Müller was far from being a philologist and a student of comparative religion in the sense in which Renan was both, and his intellectual armor was doubtless vulnerable at many points; nevertheless, it is unquestionably true that he accomplished much work of solid value, and deserved well of science for his services. That science, especially as represented by the younger school of men trained at the German universities, has done him something less than justice, is a fact that must be admitted by the impartial observer. If he failed in accuracy of knowledge, if he could not overcome certain intellectual prejudices, if he did not keep abreast of the scholarship of his time, his was still a larger personality than that of many a critic who assailed him, and who, without one-tenth of his actual accomplishment, affected to hold his authority beneath serious consideration.

  There was Max Müller’s book, which no dry-as-dust Orientalist wrote. A strong souled, sound-minded, eminently human man shone forth in delightful reminiscences of a boyhood spent in Germany, a manhood in Oxford, recollections of Goethe and Lowell, of Tennyson and Gladstone, of Pusey and Oliver Wendell Holmes.