Last Essays

Abstract

THE seventeenth volume of the late Prof. Max Müller's “Collected Works” contains a series of essays on language, folklore and other subjects which were selected for publication by the venerable scholar about the time that his illness assumed its last acute form; but, alas! he never lived to expand and annotate, according to his wont, such as had already appeared in print before. The greater number of them treat, as we should expect, of the subjects of which he had made a close and lifelong study, and these bear in every paragraph evidences of the clear thought and brilliant exposition which all Prof. Max Muller's readers were accustomed to expect from that expert philologist. In two of them, “My Predecessors” and “How to Work,” we get a few glimpses of the man as well as of the scholar, and they cannot fail to interest all those who wonder from time to time how one man, with so many varied interests and occupations, could manage to do so much good work in a single lifetime. In “How to Work” we see the leading ideas which he kept ever before him whilst carrying on his labours of copying manuscripts, editing texts and the like, and when we read the advice which he gave to the students of Manchester College in 1896 we are able to note that we are reading the words of a man who practised what he preached. He said, “Put your whole heart, or your whole love, into your work,” and “half-hearted work is really worse than no work”; it is a pity that, like the verses from the Koran which are writ large and hung up on the walls of the mosques where all men may see and read them, these excellent words cannot be copied in large letters and set before the eyes of our boys and girls in schools and colleges. Of equal value is his counsel to them to make indexes to the books that they read, and he pointed his moral admirably when he told them how he worked with slips when making his index verborum to his great edition of the “Rig-Veda.” But then Prof. Max Müller belonged to a school which produced such scholars as Fleischer, Lepsius, Bühler, Rödiger and Hoffmann, and we cannot help doubting if their modern representatives have the inclination or can find the time to make tens of thousands of index slips. The social life of Universities, even in Germany, makes it more and more difficult for a man to devote years, or months, to tasks of this kind, and a professor finds that lectures, committee meetings, &c., use up, and alas ! sometimes waste, a great deal of his time.

Last Essays.

By the Right Hon. Prof. F. Max Müller. 1st series. Pp. vii + 360. (London: Longmans and Co., 1901.) Price 5s.