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Victorian Oxford and the Science of Language

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Linda Dowling
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Abstract

In the career of the once famous and now all but forgotten Oxford philologist F. Max Muller we may trace not only the changed assumptions about language brought about in the nineteenth century by comparative or scientific philology but also some of the subversive consequences of those assumptions for Victorian ideas of literature and culture. Muller succeeded with his audiences because he was able to reassure them that in the new linguistic order language remained unchanged in its power to guarantee human identity and value. His highly idiosyncratic and unstable blending of Romantic idealism, linguistics, religious humanism, and pulpit oratory, however, ultimately assured his failure as a linguistic scientist.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 97 , Issue 2 , March 1982 , pp. 160 - 178
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1982

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References

1 Biographical information about Miiller will be found in The Life and Letters of the Rt. Honourable Friedrich Max Miiller, ed. Georgina Grenfell Miiller, 2 vols. (New York: AMS, 1976); F. Max Miiller, My Autobiography: A Fragment (New York: Scribners, 1901); Muller's Auld Lang Syne, 1st Ser. (New York: Scribners, 1898); Johannes H. Voight, Max Mueller: The Man and His Ideas (Calcutta: K. L. Mukhopadhyay, 1967); Nirad C. Chaudhuri, Scholar Extraordinary: The Life of Professor the Rt. Honourable Friedrich Max Miiller, P.C. (London: Chatto and Windus, 1974). Kurt R. Jankowsky gives a general survey of Muller's wide-ranging intellectual interests in “F. Max Miiller and the Development of Linguistic Science,” Historiographia Linguistica, 6 (1979), 339–59. For Muller's influence on G. M. Hopkins' theory of poetic language, see Michael Sprinker, “A Counterpoint of Dissonance”: The Aesthetics and Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1980), pp. 46–76. For the influence of Muller's “great and delightful book” on George Eliot, see Peter Dale, “Symbolic Representation and the Means of Revolution in Daniel Deronda,” Victorian Newsletter, No. 59 (Spring 1981), pp. 25–30. See Muller's Life and Letters for an account of Queen Victoria's response to his lectures. Victoria had summoned him to Osborne, where he gave two lectures on language before her and the royal princesses in January 1864. Miiller recalled with great satisfaction that at the first lecture the queen “did not knit at all, though her work was brought,” and at the second no work was even brought (i, 303–04).

2 In the spring of 1873 Miiller lectured at the Royal Institution on the topic “Mr. Darwin's Philosophy of Language.” George Darwin undertook to defend his father's views of language origin in “Professor Whitney on the Origin of Language,” Contemporary Review, Nov. 1874, pp. 894–904. Miiller answered with harsh remarks about Whitney in “My Reply to Mr. Darwin,” Contemporary Review, Jan. 1875, pp. 305–26, prompting Whitney (who had been criticizing MUller's work for years in America) to publish “Are Languages Institutions?” Contemporary Review, April 1875, pp.713–32. Miiller returned to the fray with a pamphlet entitled In Self-Defense (in Chips from a German Workshop, 4 vols. [London: Longmans, Green, 1867—75], iv, 473–549) and thereafter declined to contest Whitney. Whitney crowned his long campaign against Miiller with Max Midler and the Science of Language: A Criticism (New York: Appleton, 1892). Andrew Lang, bookman and student of E. B. Tylor at Oxford, first disputed Muller's philological study of mythology in “Mythology and Fairy Tales,” Fortnightly Review, May 1873, pp. 618–31, and later in Custom and Myth (1884). Muller's relations with Lang were cordial, as they were with the senior Darwin.

3 The name of the new study of language was unsettled during this period of its development, varying from Schleicher's “Glottik” to “Glossology” and “scientific etymology.” “Linguistique” and “linguistics” were preferred in France and America, though disdained in Britain, where the relatively narrow “comparative philology” was common. I use a number of different terms indifferently here, only reserving “science of language,” Muller's Englishing of Sprachwissenschaft, to refer specifically to his idiosyncratic version of the new discipline.

4 W. D. Whitney, “On Inconsistency in Views of Language,” Transactions of the American Philological Association, 11 (1880), 112. All further references to Whitney's work are to Max Miiller and the Science of Language.

5 “Hans Aarsleff, The Study of Language in England, 1780–1860 (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1967). I am indebted to Aarsleff's invaluable study for details in my account of the early history of comparative philology in Britain.

6 See Aarsleff, pp. 195–207, and the lively account in Arthur G. Kennedy, “Odium Philologicum; or, A Century of Progress in English Philology” in Stanford Studies in Language and Literature, ed. Hardin Craig (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1941), pp. 11–27; hereafter cited in the text.

7 “6th Annual Address of the President: 18 May 1877,” Transactions of the Philological Society (1877–79), p. 13.

8 . B. Tylor, “The Science of Language,” Quarterly Review, April 1866, p. 394. In his influential book The New Cratylus (1839), J. W. Donaldson could speak “of German, or, to use a more comprehensive but synonymous term, of modern” philology, and he noted that the British prejudice against German scholars went back to Porson's quarrel with Hermann.

9 [Henry Craik], “The Study of English Literature,” Quarterly Review, July 1883, p. 190.

10 Thomas Watts, “On the Probable Future Position of the English Language,” Proceedings of the Philological Society, 4 (1848–50), 212; Richard Chenevix Trench, English Past and Present (1854), in On the Study of Words and English Past and Present (New York: Dutton, [1927]), p. 28; G. C. Swayne, “Characteristics of Language,” Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, March 1862, p. 368.

11 English Past and Present, p. 9. Trench is quoting from J. G. Lockhart's 1818 translation of Schlegel's Geschichte der Alien und Neuen Literatur (1815). For Lockhart's role as one of the early British propagandists for German literature, see Rosemary Ashton, The German Idea: Four English Writers and the Reception of German Thought, 1800–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1980).

12 Nicholas Wiseman, Twelve Lectures on the Connexion between Science and Revealed Religion, Delivered in Rome, 2 vols. (London: Joseph Booker, 1836), i, 10; Matthew Arnold, “On the Study of Celtic Literature” (1867), in The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, ed. R. H. Super (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1962), iii, 328. Even the older philology was not, to be sure, without its shocks. Wolf's Prolegomena to Homer (1795) and its successors, as Browning's late poem “Development” recalls, “Proved there was never any Troy at all, / Neither Besiegers nor Besieged,—nay, worse,— / No actual Homer, no authentic text.” Arnold, however, looked on comparative philology, “that science which in our time has had so many successes,” as a model of disinterested criticism and a source of reconciling ideas. For the contemporary theological agenda behind much comparative philology, see J. W. Burrow's splendid “The Uses of Philology in Victorian England” in Ideas and Institutions of Victorian Britain: Essays in Honour of George Kitson Clark, ed. Robert Robson (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1967), pp. 180–204.

13 Max Miiller, Lectures on the Science of Language, Delivered at the Royal Institution of Great Britain in April, May and June 1861, 2nd rev. ed. (New York: Scribners, 1862), p. 164; hereafter cited in the text as Lectures, I.

14 Kingsley, The Roman and the Teuton (London: Macmillan, 1864), p. 126. Key, “The Sanskrit Language, as the Basis of Linguistic Science, and the Labours of the German School in That Field—Are They Not Overvalued?” Transactions of the Philological Society (1861–63), pp. 113–60. It is worth noting that Key, professor of comparative grammar at University College, London, did not know Sanskrit.

15 M. T., “A Few Words on Philology,” Fraser's Magazine, March 1873, p. 310, hereafter cited in the text as M. T.; [Marie von Bothmer], “German Home Life—v: Language,” Fraser's Magazine, June 1875, p. 774.

16 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Random, 1973), p. 281.

17 We must, surprisingly enough, include Coleridge in this group. Though a serious student of philology who was apparently familiar with Jones's momentous hypothesis about Sanskrit, Coleridge could declare as late as 1832, “The claims of the Sanskrit for priority to the Hebrew as a language, are ridiculous.” See L. A. Willoughby, “Coleridge as a Philologist,” Modern Language Review, 31 (1936), 176–201.

18 Hensleigh Wedgwood's three-volume Dictionary of English Etymology was published in 1859–65; as Charles Darwin's brother-in-law, Wedgwood influenced the ideas of language origin Darwin published in The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871).

19 Max Miiller, Lectures on the Science of Language, Delivered at the Royal Institution of Great Britain in February, March, April, and May, 1863, 2nd Ser. (London: Longman, 1864), p. 243; hereafter cited in the text as Lectures, n.

20 Max Miiller, “Comparative Philology,” Edinburgh Review, Oct. 1851, p. 330. A somewhat less forceful version of this statement appears in Lectures, i, 49; Charles Whibley, “Language and Style,” Fortnightly Review, Jan. 1899, p. 100.

21 Athenaeum, No. 1822 (27 Sept. 1862), p. 405. Lectures on the English Language (New York: C. Scribner, 1860), by George Perkins Marsh, the American secretary of the London Philological Society, influenced Miiller as well as Arnold; both men visited Marsh in Italy when he was there as the ambassador from the United States.

22 Frederic W. Farrar, An Essay on the Origin of Language (London: John Murray, 1860), p. 38.

23 [G. W. Cox], “Max Miiller on the Science of Language,” Edinburgh Review, Jan. 1862, p. 67.

24 Julia Wedgwood, “The Origin of Language: The Imitative Theory and Mr. Max Miiller's Theory of Phonetic Types,” Macmillan's Magazine, Nov. 1862, p. 54. Julia was Hensleigh Wedgwood's daughter. See also Tylor's “The Philology of Slang,” Macmillan's Magazine, April 1874, pp. 502–13.

25 Hermann Paul, Principles of the History of Language, 2nd ed., trans. H. A. Strong (London: Longmans, Green, 1891), p. 434.

26 “Words, Logic, and Grammar” (1876) in Collected Papers, arranged by H. C. Wyld (Oxford: Clarendon, 1913), p. 3.

27 Alexander Ellis, “Tenth Annual Address of the President: 20 May 1881,” Transactions of the Philological Society (1880–82), p. 257; Henry Sweet, “On the Practical Study of Language” (1884), in History of Linguistics, ed. Wolfgang Kuhlwein, Vol. i of Linguistics in Great Britain (Tubingen: Max Niemeyer, 1971), p. 125.

28 T. L. Kington-Oliphant, The New English, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1886), i, 622.

29 William Allingham, “On Poetry,” Fraser's Magazine, April 1867, p. 528.

30 J. A. H. Murray, Preface, The Dialect of the Southern Counties of Scotland (London: Philological Society [of London], 1873), quoted in K. M. Elisabeth Murray, Caught in the Web of Words: James A. H. Murray and the Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1979), p. 83; Richard Chenevix Trench, “On Some Deficiencies in Our English Dictionaries,” Transactions of the Philological Society (1857–59), p. 5.

31 For the centrality of literature to Victorian ideas of culture and civilization, see Michael Timko, “The Victorianism of Victorian Literature,” New Literary History, 6 (1974–75), 607–27, and Wendell V. Harris, “Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang: Looking Back at the Victorians Looking Back at the Romantics Looking Back, …” Victorian Poetry, 16 (1978), 167–75. For the Alford-Moon controversy, see Kennedy, pp. 20–24. For Churton Collins, see D. J. Palmer, The Rise of English Studies: An Account of the Study of English Language and Literature from Its Origins to the Making of the Oxford English School (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1965).

32 Henry Reeve, “The Literature and Language of the Age,” Edinburgh Review, April 1889, p. 350.

33 J. A. H. Murray, “Ninth Annual Address of the President: 21 May 1880,” Transactions of the Philological Society (1880–82), pp. 131, 132.

34 Richard Grant White, Words and Their Uses: A Study of the English Language (Boston: Houghton, 1870), p. 18.

35 Charles Mackay, “English Slang and French Argot: Fashionable and Unfashionable,” Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, May 1888, pp. 691–92.

36 At the same time, as one of Miiller's auditors reminds us, “The German, or a priori view of human knowledge, and of the knowing faculties … [finds its chief strength] in the appeal which it is accustomed to make to the evidence of mathematics and of the cognate branches of physical science. To expel it from these is to drive it from its stronghold….” J. S. Mill, Autobiography of John Stuart Mill (1873; rpt. New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1924).

37 M. H. Abrams has noted that German postKantian thought characteristically assimilated the plot patterns and crucial events of biblical history into its own philosophical speculations. See Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: Norton, 1971), pp. 178–79.

38 Muller, “Comparative Philology,” p. 339. Miiller incorporated a version of this peroration into a lecture on comparative mythology delivered in Edinburgh in 1863.

39 “Reverential” was an adjective used to describe Miiller's manner in the Edinburgh lecture (Life and Letters, i, 298); “Turanian” was Miiller's term for all languages that were neither Indo-European nor Semitic, a group characterized, he maintained, by its lack of distinguishing characteristics. Whitney characterized “Turanian” as an aggregation “which … has for a generation been a stumbling-block in the way of science” (p. 49).

40 E. W. Hopkins, “Max Muller,” Nation, 1 Nov. 1900, pp. 343–44. Reprinted in Portraits of Linguists: A Biographical Source Book for the History of Western Linguistics, 1746–1963, ed. Thomas A. Sebeok, 2 vols. (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1966), i, 398.

41 Muller, Auld Lang Syne, p. 40. Wilhelm Muller died when his son was four. Known as “Miller Muller” to Carlyle, who hoped to include some of this poet's work in German Romance (1827), Miiller is perhaps best known to modern readers through Schubert's lieder settings of “Die Schone Miillerin” and “Die Winterreise.”

42 “Max Muller and the Science of Language,” Fraser's Magazine, Jan. 1862, p. 111.