Auld lang syne

Authors complain, and in many cases complain justly, of the large number of letters and visits which they receive from unknown friends and distant admirers. I myself, though the subjects on which I write are not exactly popular, have been sitting at the receipt of such custom for many years. It is difficult to know what to do. To answer all the letters, even to acknowledge all the books that are sent to me from India, Australia, New Zealand, from every new sphere of influence in Africa, from America, North and South, and from the principal countries of Europe, would be physically impossible. A simple knowledge of arithmetic would teach my friends that if I were only to glance at a book in order to give an opinion, or say something pleasant about it, one hour at least of my time in the morning would certainly be consumed by every single book. Every writer imagines that he is the only one who writes a letter, asks a question, or sends a book; but he forgets that in this respect everybody has as much right as everybody else, and claims it too, unmindful of the rights of others, and quite unconscious that the sum total of such interruptions would swallow up the whole of a man’s working day. And there is this further danger: however guarded one may be in expressing one’s gratitude or one’s opinion of the merits of a book, one’s letter is apt to appear in advertisements, if only far away in India or the Colonies; nay, we often find that the copy of a book was not even sent us by the author himself, but with the author’s compliments, that is, by an enterprising publisher.

However, there is a compensation in all things, and I gladly confess that I have occasionally derived great advantage from the letters of my unknown friends. They have sent me valuable corrections and useful remarks for my books, they have made me presents of MSS. and local publications difficult to get even at the Bodleian and the British Museum, and I feel sure that they have not been offended even though I could not enter into a long correspondence with every one of my epistolary friends on the origin of language or the home of the Aryan race. My worst friends are those who send me their own writings and wish me to give an opinion, or to find a publisher for them. Had I attempted to comply with one half of these requests, I could have done nothing else in life. What would become of me if everybody who cannot find a publisher were to write to me! The introduction of postcards has proved, no doubt, a great blessing to all who are supposed to be oracles, but even an oracular response takes time. Speaking for myself, I may truly say that I often feel tempted to write to a man who is an authority on a special subject on which I want information. I know he could answer my question in five minutes, and yet I hardly ever venture to make the appeal, but go to a library, where I have to waste hours and hours in finding the right book, and afterwards the right passage in it. Why should not others do the same?

And what applies to letters applies to personal visits also. I do sometimes get impatient when perfect strangers call on me without any kind of introduction, sometimes even without a visiting card, and then sit down to propound some theory of their own. Still, taking all in all, I must not complain of my visitors. They do not come in shoals like letters and books, and very often they are interesting and even delightful. Many of them come from America, and the mere fact that they want to see me is a compliment which I appreciate. They have read my books, that is another compliment which I always value; and they often speak to me of things that years ago I have said in some article of mine, and which I myself have often quite forgotten.

It strikes me that Americans possess in a very high degree the gift of sight-seeing. They possess what at school was called pace. They travel over England in a fortnight, but at the end they seem to have seen all that is, and all who are, worth seeing. We wonder how they can enjoy anything. But they do enjoy what they see, and they carry away a great many photographs, not only in their albums but in their memory also. The fact is that they generally come well prepared, and know beforehand what they want to see; and, after all, there are limits to everything. If we have only a quarter of an hour to look at the Madonna di San Sisto, may not that short exposure give us an excellent negative in our memory, if only our brain is sensitive, and the lens of our eyes clear and strong? The Americans, knowing that their time is limited, make certainly an excellent use of it, and seem to carry away more than many travellers who stand for hours with open mouths before a Raphael, and in the end know no more of the picture than of the frame. It requires sharp eyes and a strong will to see much in a short time. Some portrait painters, for instance, catch a likeness in a few minutes; others sit and sit, and stare and stare, and alter and alter, and never perceive the real characteristic points in a face.

It is the same with the American interviewer. I do not like him, and I think he ought at all events to tell us that we are being interviewed. Even ancient statues are protected now against snap-shots in the museums of antiquities. But with all that I cannot help admiring him. His skill, in the cases where I have been under his scalpel or before his brush, has certainly been extraordinary, and several of them seem to have seen in my house, in my garden, in my library, and in my face, what I myself had never detected there, and all that in about half an hour. I remember one visit, however, which was rather humiliating. An American gentleman (I did not know that he was interviewing me) had been sitting with me for a long time, asking all sorts of questions and making evidently a trigonometrical survey of myself and my surroundings. At last I had to tell him that I was sorry I had to go, as I had to deliver a lecture. As he seemed so interested in my work I naturally expected he would ask me to allow him to hear my lecture. Nothing of the kind! “I am sorry,” he said, “but you don’t mind my sitting here in your library till you come back?” And, true enough, there I found him when I came home after an hour, and he was delighted to see me again. Some months after I had my reward in a most charming account of an interview with Professor Max Müller, published in an American journal. This power of observation which these interviewers, and to a certain extent most American travellers, seem to possess, is highly valuable, and as most of us cannot hope to have more than a few hours to see such monuments as St. Peter or Santa Sophia, or such giants as Tennyson or Browning, we ought to take a leaf out of the book of our American friends, and try to acquire some of their pace and go.

And then, America does not send us interviewers only, but nearly all their most eminent men and their most charming women pay us the compliment of coming over to the old country. They generally cannot give us more than a few days, or it may be a few hours only; and in that short space we also have to learn how to measure them, how to appreciate and love them. It has to be done quickly, or not at all. Living at Oxford, I have had the good fortune of receiving visits from Emerson, Dr. Wendell Holmes, and Lowell, to speak of the brightest stars only. Each of them stayed at our house for several days, so that I could take them in at leisure, while others had to be taken at one gulp, often between one train and the next. Oxford has a great attraction for all Americans, and it is a pleasure to see how completely at home they feel in the memories of the place. The days when Emerson, Wendell Holmes, and Lowell were staying with us, the breakfasts and luncheons, the teas and dinners, and the delightful walks through college halls, chapels and gardens are possessions for ever.

Emerson, I am grieved to say, when during his last visit to England he spent some days with us, accompanied and watched over by his devoted daughter, was already on the brink of that misfortune which overtook him in his old age. His memory often failed him, but as through a mist the bright and warm sun of his mind was always shining, and many of his questions and answers have remained engraved in my memory, weak and shaky as that too begins to be. I had forgotten that Emerson had ceased to be an active preacher, and I told him that I rather envied him the opportunity of speaking now and then to his friends and neighbours on subjects on which we can seldom speak except in church. He then told me not only what he had told others, that “he had had enough of it,” but he referred to an episode in his life, or rather in that of his brother, which struck me as very significant at the time. “There was an ecclesiastical leaven in our family,” he said. “My brother and I were both meant for the ministry in the Unitarian community. My brother was sent by my father to Germany (I believe to Göttingen), and after a thorough study of theology was returning to America. On the voyage home the ship was caught in a violent gale, and all hope of saving the ship and the lives of the passengers was given up. At that time my brother said his prayers, and made a vow that if his life should be spared he would never preach again, but give up theology altogether and earn an honest living in some other way. The ship weathered the storm, my brother’s life was saved, and, in spite of all entreaties, he kept his vow. Something of the same kind may have influenced me,” he added: “anyhow, I felt that there was better work for me to do than to preach from the pulpit.” And so, no doubt, there was for this wonderfully gifted man, particularly at the time and in the place where he lived. A few years’ study at Göttingen might have been useful to the younger Emerson by showing him the track followed by other explorers of the unknown seas of religion and philosophy, but he felt in himself the force to grapple with the great problems of the world without going first to school to learn how others before him had grappled with them. And this was perhaps the best for him and for us. His freshness and his courage remained undamped by the failures of others, and the directness of his judgment and poetical intuition had freer scope in his rhapsodies than it would have had in learned treatises. I do not wonder that philosophers by profession had at first nothing to say to his essays because they did not seem to advance their favourite inquiries beyond the point they had reached before. But there were many people, particularly in America, to whom these rhapsodies did more good than any learned disquisitions or carefully arranged sermons. There is in them what attracts us so much in the ancients, freshness, directness, self-confidence, unswerving loyalty to truth, as far as they could see it. He had no one to fear, no one to please. Socrates or Plato, if suddenly brought to life again in America, might have spoken like Emerson, and the effect produced by Emerson was certainly like that produced by Socrates in olden times.

What Emerson’s personal charm must have been in earlier life we can only conjecture from the rapturous praises bestowed on him by his friends, even during his lifetime. A friend of his who had watched Emerson and his work and his ever-increasing influence, declares without hesitation that “the American nation is more indebted to his teaching than to any other person who has spoken or written on his themes during the last twenty years.” He calls his genius “the measure and present expansion of the American mind.” And his influence was not confined to the American mind. I have watched it growing in England. I still remember the time when even experienced literary judges spoke of his essays as mere declamations, as poetical rhapsodies, as poor imitations of Carlyle. Then gradually one man after another found something in Emerson which was not to be found in Carlyle, particularly his loving heart, his tolerant spirit, his comprehensive sympathy with all that was or was meant to be good and true, even though to his own mind it was neither the one nor the other.

After a time some more searching critics were amazed at sentences which spoke volumes, and showed that Emerson, though he had never written a systematic treatise on philosophy, stood on a firm foundation of the accumulated philosophic thought of centuries. Let us take such a sentence as “Generalisation is always a new influx of divinity into the mind—hence the thrill that attends.” To the ordinary reader such a sentence can convey very little; it might seem, in fact, a mere exaggeration. But to those who know the long history of thought connected with the question of the origin of conceptual thought as the result of ceaseless generalisation, Emerson’s words convey the outcome of profound thought. They show that he had recognised in general ideas, which are to us merely the result of a never-ceasing synthesis, the original thoughts or logoi underlying the immense variety of created things; that he had traced them back to their only possible source, the Divine Mind, and that he saw how the human mind, by rising from particulars to the general, was in reality approaching the source of those divine thoughts, and thus becoming conscious, as it were, of the influx of divinity. Other philosophers have expressed similar thoughts by saying that induction is the light that leads us up, deduction the light that leads us down. Mill thought that generalisation is a mere process of mother-wit, of the shrewd and untaught intelligence; and that, from one narrow point of view, it is so, has been fully proved since by an analysis of language. Every word is a generalisation, and contains in itself a general idea, the so-called root. These first generalisations are, no doubt, at first the work of mother-wit and untaught intelligence only, and hence the necessity of constantly correcting them, whether by experience or by philosophy. But these words are nevertheless the foundation of all later thought, and if they have not reached as yet the fulness of the Divine Logoi, they represent at least the advancing steps by which alone the human mind could reach, and will reach at last, the ideas of the Divine Mind.

Thus one pregnant sentence of Emerson’s shows, when we examine it more closely, that he had seen deeper into the mysteries of nature, and of the human mind, than thousands of philosophers, call them evolutionists (realists) or nominalists. Evolutionists imagine that they have explained everything that requires explanation in nature if they have shown a more or less continuous development from the moneres to man, from the thrills of the moneres to the thoughts of man. Nominalists again think that by ascending from the single to the general, and by comprehending the single under a general name, they have solved all the questions involved in nature, that is, in our comprehension of nature. They never seem to remember that there was a time when all that we call either single or general, but particularly all that is general, had for the first time to be conceived or created. Before there was a single tree, some one must have thought the tree or treehood. Before there was a single ape, or a single man, some one must have thought that apehood or that manhood which we see realised in every ape and in every man, unless we can bring ourselves to believe in a thoughtless world. If that first thought was the concept of a mere moneres, still in that thought there must have been the distant perspective of ape or man, and it is that first thought alone which to the present day keeps the ape an ape, and a man a man. Divine is hardly a name good enough for that first Thinker of Thoughts. Still, it is that Divinity which Emerson meant when he said that generalisation is always a new influx of divinity into the mind because it reveals to the mind the first thoughts, the Divine Logoi, of the universe. The thrill of which he speaks is the thrill arising from the nearness of the Divine, the sense of the presence of those Divine Logoi, or that Divine Logos, which in the beginning was with God, and without which not anything was made that was made. Evolution can never be more than the second act; the first act is the Volition or the Thought of the universe, unless we hold that there can be effect without a cause, or a Kosmos without a Logos.

Such utterances, lost almost in the exuberance of Emerson’s thoughts, mark the distinction between a thoughtful and a shallow writer, between a scarred veteran and a smooth recruit. They will give permanence to Emerson’s influence both at home and abroad, and place him in the ranks of those who have not lived or thought in vain. When he left my house, I knew, of course, that we should never meet again in this life, but I felt that I had gained something that could never be taken from me.

Another eminent American who often honoured my quiet home at Oxford was James Russell Lowell, for a time United States Minister in England. He was a Professor and at the same time a politician and a man of the world. Few essays are so brimful of interesting facts and original reflections as his essays entitled “Among my Books.” His “Biglow Papers,” which made him one of the leading men in the United States, appeal naturally to American rather than to Cosmopolitan readers. But in society he was at home in England as much as in America, in Spain as well as in Holland.

I came to know him first as a sparkling correspondent, and then as a delightful friend.

Here is the letter which began our intimacy:—

I read with great satisfaction what you wrote about jade.^[12] One is tempted to cry out, with Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, “How now, ye pampered jades of Asia!” One thing in the discussion has struck me a good deal, and that is, the crude notion which intelligent men have of the migration of tribes. I think most men’s conception of distance is very much a creature of maps—which make Crim Tartary and England not more than a foot apart, so that the feat of the old rhyme—“to dance out of Ireland into France,” looks easy. They seem to think that the shifting of habitation was accomplished like a modern journey by rail, and that the emigrants wouldn’t need tools by the way or would buy them at the nearest shop after their arrival. There is nothing the ignorant and the poor cling to so tenaciously as their familiar household utensils. Incredible things are brought every day to America in the luggage of emigrants—things often most cumbrous to carry and utterly useless in the new home. Families that went from our seaboard to the West a century ago, through an almost impenetrable wilderness, carried with them all their domestic pots and pans—even those, I should be willing to wager, that needed the tinker. I remember very well the starting of an expedition from my native town of Cambridge in 1831, for Oregon, under the lead of a captain of great energy and resource. They started in waggons ingeniously contrived so as to be taken to pieces, the body forming a boat for crossing rivers. They carried everything they could think of with them, and got safely to the other side of the continent, as hard a job, I fancy, as our Aryan ancestors had to do. There is hardly a family of English descent in New England that doesn’t cherish, as an heirloom, something brought over by the first ancestors two hundred and fifty years ago. And besides the motive of utility there is that also of sentiment—particularly strong in the case of an old tool.

Lowell’s conversation was inexhaustible, his information astonishing. Pleasant as he was, even as an antagonist, he would occasionally lose his temper and use very emphatic language. I was once sitting next to him when I heard him stagger his neighbour, a young lady, by bursting out with: “But, madam, I do not accept your major premiss!”

Poor thing, she evidently was not accustomed to such language, and not acquainted with that terrible term. She collapsed, evidently quite at a loss as to what gift on her part Mr. Lowell declined to accept.

Sometimes even the most harmless remark about America would call forth very sharp replies from him. Everybody knows that the salaries paid by America to her diplomatic staff are insufficient, and no one knew it better than he himself. But when the remark was made in his presence that the United States treated their diplomatic representatives stingily, he fired up, and discoursed most eloquently on the advantages of high thoughts and humble living. His cleverness and readiness in writing occasional verses have become proverbial, and I am glad to be able to add two more to the many jeux d’esprit of this brilliant and amiable guest.

Abundant as was his wit in the true sense of that word, his kindness was equally so. After he had written the above verses for my wife, my young daughter Beatrice (now Mrs. Colyer Fergusson) asked him, as young ladies are wont to do, for a few lines for herself. He at once resumed his pen and wrote:—

24th June, 1886.

I lost the pleasure of shaking hands with Longfellow during his stay in England. Though I have been more of a fixture at Oxford than most professors, I was away during the vacation when he paid his visit to our University, and thus lost seeing a poet to whom I felt strongly attracted, not only by the general spirit of his poetry, which was steeped in German thought, but as the translator of several of my father’s poems.

I was more fortunate with Dr. Wendell Holmes. His arrival in England had been proclaimed beforehand, and one naturally remained at home in order to be allowed to receive him. His hundred days in England were one uninterrupted triumphal progress. When he arrived at Liverpool he found about three hundred invitations waiting for him. Though he was accompanied by a most active and efficient daughter, he had at once to engage a secretary to answer this deluge of letters. And though he was past eighty, he never spared himself, and was always ready to see and to be seen. He was not only an old, but a ripe and mellow man.

There was no subject on which one could touch which was not familiar to the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table. His thoughts and his words were ready, and one felt that it was not for the first time that the subject had been carefully thought out and talked out by him. That he should have been able to stand all the fatigue of his journey and the constant claims on his ready wit seemed to me marvellous. I had the pleasure of showing him the old buildings of Oxford. He seemed to know them all, and had something to ask and to say about every one.

When we came to Magdalen College, he wanted to see and to measure the elms. He was very proud of some elms in America, and he had actually brought some string with which he had measured the largest tree he knew in his own country. He proceeded to measure one of our finest elms in Magdalen College, and when he found that it was larger than his American giant, he stood before it admiring it, without a single word of envy or disappointment.

I had, however, a great fright while he was staying at our house. He had evidently done too much, and after our first dinner party he had feverish shivering fits, and the doctor whom I sent for declared at once that he must keep perfectly quiet in bed, and attend no more parties of any kind. This was a great disappointment to myself and to many of my friends. But at his time of life the doctor’s warning could not be disregarded, and I had, at all events, the satisfaction of sending him off to Cambridge safe and sound. I had him several days quite to myself, and there were few subjects which we did not discuss. We mostly agreed, but even where we did not, it was a real pleasure to differ from him. We discussed the greatest and the smallest questions, and on every one he had some wise and telling remarks to pour out. I remember one long conversation while we were sitting in an old wainscoted room at All Souls’, ornamented with the arms of former fellows. It had been at first the library of the college, then one of the fellows’ rooms, and lastly a lecture-room. We were deep in the old question of the true relation between the Divine and the Human in man, and here again, as on all other questions, everything seemed to be clear and evident to his mind. Perhaps I ought not to repeat what he said to me when we parted: “I have had much talk with people in England; with you I have had a real conversation.” We understood each other, and wondered how it was that men so often misunderstood one another. I told him that it was the badness of our language, he thought it was the badness of our tempers. Perhaps we were both right. With him again good-bye was good-bye for life, and at such moments one wonders indeed how kindred souls became separated, and one feels startled and repelled at the thought that, such as they were on earth, they can never meet again. And yet there is continuity in the world, there is no flaw, no break anywhere, and what has been will surely be again, though how it will be we cannot know, and if only we trust in the Wisdom that pervades and overshadows the whole Universe, we need not know.

Were I to write down my more or less casual meetings with men of literary eminence, I should have much more to say, much that was of deep interest and value to myself, but would hardly be of interest to others. I felt greatly flattered, for instance, when years ago Macaulay invited me to see him at the Albany, and to discuss with him the new regulations for the Indian Civil Service. This must have been in about 1854. I was quite a young and unknown man at the time, but I had already made his acquaintance at Bunsen’s house, where he had been asked to meet Herr von Radowitz, for a short time Prime Minister in Prussia, and the most famous talker in Germany. It was indeed a tournament to watch, but as it was in English, which Radowitz spoke well, yet not well enough for such a contest, Macaulay carried the day, though Radowitz excelled in repartee, in anecdotes, and in a certain elegance more telling in French than in English.

I went to call on Macaulay in London, well provided as I thought with facts and arguments in support of the necessity of Oriental studies, which I knew he had always discouraged, in the preparation and examination of candidates for the Indian Civil Service. He began by telling me that he knew nothing of Indian languages and literature, and that he wanted to know all I had to say on the real advantages to be derived by young civilians from a study of Sanskrit. I had already published several letters in The Times on the subject, and had carried on a long controversy with Sir Charles Trevelyan, afterwards published in a pamphlet, entitled “Correspondence relating to the Establishment of an Oriental College in London.”

Macaulay, after sitting down, asked me a number of questions, but before I had time to answer any one of them, he began to relate his own experiences in India, dilating on the difference between a scholar and a man of business, giving a full account of his controversy, while in India, with men like Professor Wilson and others, who maintained that English would never become the language of India, expressing his own strong conviction to the contrary, and relating a number of anecdotes, showing that the natives learnt English far more easily than the English could ever learn Hindustani or Sanskrit. Then he branched off into some disparaging remarks about Sanskrit literature, particularly about their legal literature, entering minutely into the question of what authority could be assigned to the Laws of Manu, and of what possible use they could be in determining lawsuits between natives, ending up with the usual diatribes about the untruthfulness of the natives of India, and their untrustworthiness as witnesses in a court of law.

This went on for nearly an hour and was very pleasant to listen to, but most disappointing to a young man who had come well primed with facts to meet all these arguments, and who tried in vain to find a chance to put in a single word. At the end of this so-called conversation Macaulay thanked me for the useful information I had given him, and I went back to Oxford a sadder and I hope a wiser man. What I had chiefly wished to impress on him was that Haileybury should not be suppressed, but should be improved, should not be ended, but mended. But it was easier and more popular to suppress it, and suppressed it was, so that in England, which has the largest Oriental Empire in the world, there is now not a single school or seminary for the teaching of Oriental languages, whereas France, Italy, Prussia, Austria and Russia have all found it expedient to have such establishments and to support them by liberal grants. Everybody now begins to see that these governments are reaping their rewards, but in England the old argument remains the same: “We can always find interpreters if we pay them well, and if we only speak loud enough the natives never fail to understand what we mean.”

This is no doubt much the same as what Mr. Layard meant when he explained to me how he managed to keep his diggers in order: “I speak English to them; if they do not understand I shout at them,” he said; “if they won’t obey, I knock them down; and if they show fight, I shoot them down.” No doubt this was an exaggeration, but it certainly does not prove the uselessness of a thorough knowledge of Oriental languages for those who are sent to the East to govern millions, and not to shout at them, or to knock them down.

Another true friend of mine was Arthur Helps, the author of “Friends in Council,” and for a long time clerk to the Privy Council. He often paid us a visit on his way to or from Blenheim, where he used to stay with the then Duke of Marlborough. He had a very high opinion of the Duke’s ability as President of the Council, and considered his personal influence most important. “At the time of a change of Ministry, you should see the members of the Cabinet,” he said. “People imagine they are miserable and disheartened. The fact is they are like a pack of schoolboys going home for their holidays, and scrambling out of the Council Chamber as fast as ever they can.”

Once when he came to stay with us on his return from Blenheim, he told me how the Duke had left the day before for London, and that on that very day the emu had laid an egg. The Duke had taken the greatest interest in his emus and had long looked forward to this event. A telegram was sent to the Duke, which, when shown to Mr. Helps, ran as follows: “The emu has laid an egg, and, in the absence of your Grace, we have taken the largest goose we could find to hatch it.”

Helps was a most sensible and thoroughly honest man; yet the last years of his life were dreadfully embittered by some ill-advised speculations of his which brought severe losses not only on himself, but, what he felt far more keenly, on several of his friends whom he had induced to share in his undertaking.

I missed the pleasure of knowing Lord Lytton. But this illustrious writer, Lord Lytton, or in earlier days, Sir Lytton Bulwer Lytton, whose “Last Days of Pompeii” had been the delight of my youth, paid me a great and quite undeserved compliment by dedicating to me one of his last, if not his very last work, “The Coming Race,” 1871. The book was published anonymously, and as it was dedicated to me, I tried very hard to discover the author of it, but in vain. It was only after his death that Lord Lytton’s authorship became known. The book itself could hardly be called a novel, nor was there anything very striking or sensational in it. Yet, to the honour of the English public be it said, it was discovered at once that it could not be the work of an ordinary writer. It went through edition after edition, and, to the great delight of the anonymous author, was received with universal applause. Vril was the name given by the author to the fluid which in the hands of a Vrilya was raised into the mightiest agency over all forms of matter, animate or inanimate. It destroyed like the flash of lightning, yet, differently applied, it replenished or invigorated life. With it a way could be rent through the most solid substances, and from it a light was extracted, steadier, softer, and healthier than from all other inflammable materials. The fire lodged in the hollow of a reed, and directed by the hand of a child, could shatter the strongest fortress, or cleave its burning way from the van to the rear of an embattled host. All this reads almost like a prophecy of the electric fluid in its application to engines of war and engines of peace, but its name now survives chiefly in the powerful and invigorating fluid extracted from beef, and advertised on every wall as Bo-vril—unless I am quite mistaken in my etymology.

There are many more of the most eminent men in England from whom I have received kindness, and with whom, even as a young man, I had some interesting intercourse. But I become more and more doubtful whether I can trust my memory, and whether, in writing down my recollections, I am doing my friends full justice. When I gave my first lectures at the Royal Institution (in 1861), I came into frequent contact with Faraday. He was then what I thought an old man, and though it was quite beyond my power to estimate his greatness, he was one of those men who at once gave one the impression that they are really great. There was dignity and composure in his conversation, and at the same time a kindly welcome in his dark bright eyes which made one feel at home with him from the very first meeting. Though the subject I had to lecture on was quite new to him, he took the liveliest interest in my lectures. I told him how disappointed his assistant had been—I believe his name was Anderson or Robertson—when he offered me his services for my lectures, and I had to tell him that I wanted nothing, no gas, no light, no magnets, that there would be no experiments, not even diagrams to pull up and down. “O yes,” said Faraday, “I know how he tells his friends that he does all the hard work at my lectures, all the experiments, but that he lets me do the talking.” He seemed much amused when I told him that I had had just the same experience, and that one of my compositors was fully convinced that he was really responsible for my books, and told his fellow-compositors that I could not have brought out a single book without him.

Faraday sat patiently through most, if not all of my lectures, and it was a pleasure to look at his face beaming with intelligence. When I lectured for the first time on the Science of Language, I had in the beginning to clear the ground of many prejudices, and amongst the rest, to dispose of what was then almost an article of faith—namely, that all the languages of the world were derived from Hebrew. I gave a whole lecture to this question, and when it was over, an imposing old lady came up to shake hands with me and to thank me for the beautiful lecture I had delivered. “How delightful it is to know,” she continued, “that Adam and Eve spoke Hebrew in Paradise, and that all the other languages of the world, English not excepted, have come out of Hebrew and out of Paradise.” I really felt very much humiliated, and when Faraday came up I told him what had happened. “Oh, you must not be discouraged,” he said, “I hardly ever lecture on chemistry without an old dowager coming up to me with an incredulous smile and saying: ‘Now, Mr. Faraday, you don’t really mean to say that the water I drink is nothing but what you call oxygen and hydrogen?’ Go on,” he said, “something will always stick.”

I certainly had splendid audiences; all the best men of the town were there. But brilliant as my audiences were—they included A. P. Stanley, Fredk. Maurice, Dean Milman, Bishop Thirlwall, Mill, Lady Stanley, even royalty honoured me several times—the old habitués of the Royal Institution were not easy to please. The front row was generally occupied by old men with hearing-trumpets, old Indians, old generals, old clergymen, etc. A number of ladies came in with their newspaper and unfolded it before the lecture began, and seemed to read it with their eyes while their ears were supposed to follow my arguments. One’s self-conceit is sometimes very much tried. After one of my lectures I saw one of the old East Indians led out by his son or nephew, who shouted in a loud voice into his father’s ear, “That was a splendid lecture, was it not?” “Yes,” said the old man in a still louder voice, “very interesting—very; didn’t understand a single word of it.” Such is reputation. On another occasion the same deaf and loud-voiced gentleman was heard to tell his neighbour who I was and what I had done. “Yes,” he shouted, “I know him; he is a clever young man. And we have appointed him to do some work for us, to publish the old Bible of India. We have also made him our examiner for the Civil Service of India. A clever young man, I assure you.”

That is how I rose in the estimation of the London world, and how Albemarle Street became crowded with fashionable carriages, and people could hardly find places in order to hear all about Aryan roots and our Aryan ancestors, and our common Aryan home somewhere in Asia.

It was in the same Royal Institution that I first raised my voice against the thoughtless extravagances of the so-called Darwinian School, and this at a time when it required more courage to express a doubt on any Darwinian theories than to doubt the descent of all languages from Hebrew. As to Darwin himself, I had expressed my admiration of him in my very first course of lectures, and I had more particularly tried to show how the idea of evolution, or development, or growth, or whatever name we like to use instead of the name of history, had at all times been the guiding principle in the researches of the students of the “Science of Languages.” Our object had always been to discover how languages came to be what they are, to study the origin and growth, or more truly the history of language. If we spoke of the development or evolution of language (Entwickelung) it was simply in order to avoid the constant use of the same word. We comparative philologists had, in fact, been talking evolution for more than forty years, as M. Jourdain had been talking prose all his life, without being aware of it (sans que j’en susse rien). But we never went into raptures about that blessed word “evolution,” or about the passage from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous.

What I, from my own point of view, valued particularly in Darwin’s philosophy was the technical term of Natural Selection. Logically it was not quite correct, for, say what you like, selection presupposes a selector. Without a selector there is no selection, and unless we speak mythologically, we cannot speak of Nature as a selector. I should have preferred, therefore, Rational Elimination, looking upon Reason, or the Good of Plato, as the power that works for good or for fitness in all that survives or is not crowded out. But with this restriction Natural Selection was the very term we wanted to signify that process which is constantly going on in language—“excluding caprice as well as necessity, including individual exertion as well as general co-operation, applicable neither to the unconscious building of bees nor to the conscious architecture of human beings, yet combining within itself both these operations, and raising them to a higher conception.”^[14] Natural selection was the very term we wanted for a true insight into the so-called growth of language, and it was Darwin who gave it us, even though for our own purposes we had to define it more strictly.

I gave Darwin full credit for having discovered and popularised this new “category of thought,” but the constant hallelujahs that were raised over the discovery of Evolution showed surely an extraordinary ignorance of the history of philosophical thought in Europe. Darwin himself was the very last person to claim evolution as a discovery of his own; but is there a single paper that has not called him the discoverer of Evolution? He knew too well how, particularly in his own special field of study, the controversy whether each so-called genus or species had required a separate act of creation, had been raging for centuries. He remembered the famous controversy in 1830 at the French Institute, between Cuvier and Geoffray Saint-Hilaire, and Goethe’s equally famous remarks on the subject. It would seem as if Darwin himself had originally been under the spell of the old idea that every species, if not every individual, required a special act of creation, and he describes, if I remember rightly, the shock it gave him when he saw for the first time that this idea had to be surrendered. It was evidently considered to be the orthodox view of creation, though I do not know why; nay, it seems to be so still, if we remember how the present Archbishop of Canterbury was represented as unfit to wear a mitre because he believed in evolution; that is, as I should say, in his senses. I myself, on the contrary, was given to understand at the time by my unorthodox friends that my want of belief in evolution was but a survival of my orthodox opinions. I was much puzzled before I could understand why I was looked at askance, till in one of the reviews I was told in so many words that if I did not believe in evolution, I must believe in the theory of special creations, or in nothing at all. Even Tyndall, dear honest Tyndall, told me one day at the Royal Institution that it was no use my kicking against the pricks, and I then had an opportunity of telling him my mind. “When some substance is brought you,” I said, “don’t you first of all analyse it to find out what it consists of, before you use it for any further experiments? Well, that is really what a student of language does. When you bring him a word like evolution, the first thing he asks for is an analysis or definition. That may often seem very discourteous, but it cannot be otherwise in any decent laboratory of chemistry or thought. Now if evolution is meant for an action, you cannot have an action without an actor, whether his action is direct or indirect. Of course you will say that we all know that, that it is mere childish logic; but, if so, we should not imagine that we can neglect this childish logic with impunity, that we can have a successful experiment without first wiping our crucibles clean. If, on the contrary, evolution is to be taken in the sense of a process excluding an actor or evolver, this should be clearly stated, and in that case the more familiar word ‘growth’ would have been far preferable, because it would not have raised unfounded expectations. But even growth means very little unless it is authenticated by history step by step.

“If then you tell me that there is growth, not only from the sperm to men like you and me, not only from an egg to a caterpillar, from a caterpillar to a chrysalis, and from a chrysalis to a butterfly, but likewise from inorganic to organised matter, from plants to animals, from reptiles to birds, from apes to men, I have not a word to say against it. I know you to be an honest man, and if you can assure me that there are historical facts, real, visible facts, to support this transition from one species to another, or even from one genus to another, I trust you. It would be simple arrogance were I to doubt your word, within your own special sphere of study. You have seen the transition or connecting links, you know that it is not only possible, but real, and there is an end of it. Only allow me to say that from a philosophical point of view there is nothing new in this concept of growth, or, as you call it, evolution. You would never say that Lamarck had been the discoverer of growth in nature, neither has it any definite meaning to me when you say that Darwin was the discoverer of evolution. I can understand enough of Darwin’s ‘Origin of Species’ to enable me to admire his power of observation and his true genius of combination. I can see how he has reduced the number of unnecessary species, and of unnecessary acts of so-called special creation; and that possibly he has traced back the whole of the animal and vegetable kingdoms to four beginnings, and in the end to one Creator. Darwin did not go beyond this, he required four beginnings and one Creator. It was left to his followers to carry out his principles, as they thought, by eliminating the Creator, and reducing the four beginnings to one. If you think that all this rests on well ascertained facts, I have nothing to say except to express my surprise that some men of great learning and undoubted honesty are not so positive as to these facts as you are. But with the exception of a Creator, that is, a subjective Author of the universe, all this is really outside my special province, and I could afford to be silent. Only when Darwin maintains the transition from some highly developed animal into a human being, I say, Stop! Here the student of language has a word to say, and I say that language is something that, even in its most rudimentary form, puts an impassable barrier between beast and man.”

Soon after, when I had been asked to give a new course of lectures at the Royal Institution, I had selected this very point, the barrier which language forms between man and brute, for my subject, and as Darwin’s “Descent of Man” was then occupying the thoughts of philosophers, I promised to give a course of lectures on “Darwin’s Philosophy of Language.” Entertaining, as I did, a sincere admiration for Darwin, I felt that it would have been even discourteous to attempt to be courteous to such a man by passing over in silence what he had said on language. This kind of courtesy is most offensive to a true man of science. Otherwise nothing would have been easier than to find antagonists for my purpose, beginning with Epicurus and ending with Mr. H. Wedgwood’s “Etymological Dictionary of the English Language” (second edition, 1872). It so happened that the author of that dictionary was a friend of Darwin’s, and had easily persuaded him that interjections and imitations of natural sounds formed the material elements of all human speech, and that, as certain animals barked, and mocking birds and parrots imitated sounds which they heard, there seemed to be no reason whatever why animals in a few millions of years should not have invented a language of their own. This naturally fell in with Darwin’s own views and wishes, and though he always spoke with great reserve on the subject of language, yet he would have been more than human if he had surrendered his conviction of the descent of man from some kind of animal on account of this, as his friend had assured him, so easily removable barrier of language. Given a sufficient number of years, he thought, and why should not bow-wow and pooh-pooh have evolved into “I bark” and “I despise”? The fact that no animal had ever evolved such words could not be denied, but it could be ignored, or explained away by evidence clearly showing that animals communicated with each other; as if to communicate were the same as to speak. My object in my lectures (published at the time in Longman’s Magazine) was to show that no such transition from pooh-pooh to I despise is possible; nay, that even the first step, the formation of roots, that is, of general concepts out of single sounds, that is, single percepts, is beyond the power of any animal, except the human animal. Even now it is only the human baby or puppy that can learn to imitate human language, and what is the mere learning of a language, compared with the creation of language, which was the real task of those human animals that became men? In all the arguments which I used in support of my theory—a theory no longer controverted, I believe, by any competent and independent scholar and thinker—I never used a single disrespectful word about Mr. Darwin. But for all that I was supposed to have blasphemed, again not by Mr. Darwin himself, but by those who called themselves his bulldogs. I was actually suspected of having written that notorious article in The Quarterly Review which gave such just offence to Darwin. Darwin himself was above all this, and I have his letter in which he writes, 5th January, 1875:—

I have just read the few first pages of your article in The Contemporary Review, and I hope that you will permit me to say that neither I, nor my son, ever supposed that you were the author of the review in the Quarterly. You are about the last man in England to whom I should have attributed such a review. I know it was written by Mr. M., and the utterly false and base statements contained in it are worthy of the man.

But what was better still, Mr. Darwin gave me an opportunity of discussing the facts and arguments which stood between him and me in a personal interview. Sir John Lubbock took me to see the old philosopher at his place, Down, Beckenham, Kent, and there are few episodes in my life which I value more. I need not describe the simplicity of his house, and the grandeur of the man who had lived and worked in it for so many years. Darwin gave me a hearty welcome, showed me his garden and his flowers, and then took me into his study, and standing leaning against his desk began to examine me. He said at once that personally he was quite ignorant of the science of language, and had taken his facts and opinions chiefly from his friend, Mr. Wedgwood. I had been warned that Darwin could not carry on a serious discussion for more than about ten minutes or a quarter of an hour, as it always brought on his life-long complaint of sickness. I therefore put before him in the shortest way possible the difficulties which prevented me from accepting the theory of animals forming a language out of interjections and sounds of nature. I laid stress on the fact that no animal, except the human animal, had ever made a step towards generalisation of percepts, and towards roots, the real elements of all languages, as signs of such generalised percepts, and I gave him a few illustrations of how our words for one to ten, for father, mother, sun and moon had really and historically been evolved. That man thus formed a real anomaly in the growth of the animal kingdom, as conceived by him, I fully admitted; but it was impossible for me to ignore facts, and language in its true meaning has always been to my mind a fact that could not be wiped away by argument, as little as the Himalayas could be wiped away with a silk handkerchief even in millions of years. He listened most attentively without making any objections, but before he shook hands and left me, he said in the kindest way, “You are a dangerous man.” I ventured to reply, “There can be no danger in our search for truth,” and he left the room.

He was exactly the man I had imagined, massive in his forehead, kind in his smile, and hardly bent under the burden of his knowledge or the burden of his years. I must give one more of his letters, because my late friend Romanes, who saw it in my album, seems to have entirely misapprehended its meaning. He saw in it a proof of Mr. Darwin’s extraordinary humility. I do not deny his humility, it was extraordinary, and, what is more, it was genuine. All great men know how little they know in comparison with what they do not know. They are humble, they do not only wish to appear so. But I see in Darwin’s letter far more of humour than of humility. I see him chuckling while he wrote it, and though I value it as a treasure, I never looked upon it as a trophy.