My Autobiography: A FragmentMüller, F. Max (Friedrich Max)
Religion
My Autobiography: A Fragment
Müller, F. Max (Friedrich Max)
Asianists -- Germany -- Biography; Müller, F. Max (Friedrich Max), 1823-1900
Not very long ago I remember reading in a journal a story of the Duke
of Wellington. His servant had been sent before to order dinner for
him at an out-of-the-way hotel, and in order to impress the landlord
with the dignity of his coming guest, he had recited a number of the
Duke’s titles, which were very numerous. The landlord, thinking that
the Duke of Vittoria, the Prince of Waterloo, the Marquis of Torres
Vedras, and all the rest, were friends invited to dine with the Duke
of Wellington, ordered accordingly a very sumptuous banquet to the
great dismay of the real Duke. This may or may not be a very old and a
very true story; all I know is that much the same thing was told at
Oxford of Dr. Bull, who was Canon of Christ Church, Canon of Exeter,
Prebendary of York, Vicar of Staverton, and lastly, the Rev. Dr. Bull
himself. Dinner was provided for each of these persons, and we are
told that the reverend pluralist had to eat all the dishes on the
table and pay for them. This also may have been no more than one of
the many “Common-roomers” which abounded in Oxford when Common Rooms
were more frequented than they are now. But what I happen to know as a
fact is that Dean Stanley received no less than four invitations to a
hall at Blenheim, addressed A. P. Stanley, Esq., the Rev. A. P.
Stanley, Canon Stanley, Professor Stanley, all evidently copied from
some books of reference.
I may perhaps claim one advantage in trying to describe what happened
to myself in my passage through life. From the earliest days that I
can recollect, I felt myself as a twofold being—as a subject and an
object, as a spectator and as an actor. I suppose we all talk to
ourselves, and say to our better and worse selves, O thou fool! or,
Well done, my boy! Well this inward conversation began with me at a
very early time, and left the impression that I was the coachman, but
at the same time the horse too which he drove and sometimes whipped
very cruelly. And this phase of thought, or rather this state of
feeling, seems soon to have led me on to another view which likewise
dates from a very early time, though it afterwards vanished. As a
little boy, when I could not have the same toys which other boys
possessed, I could fully enjoy what they enjoyed, as if they had been
my own. There is a German phrase, “Ich freue mich in deiner Seele,”
which exactly expressed what I often felt. It was not the result of
teaching, still less of reasoning—it was a sentiment given me and
which certainty did not leave me till much later in life, when
competition, rivalry, jealousy, and envy seemed to accentuate my own I
as against all other I’s or Thou’s. I suppose we all remember how the
sight of a wound of a fellow creature, nay even of a dog, gives us a
sharp twitch in the same part of our own body. That bodily sympathy
has never left me, I suffer from it even now as I did seventy years
ago. And is there anybody who has not felt his eyes moisten at the
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