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DECEMBER, 1898.]
IN MEMORIAM GEORGE BÜHLER.
as the man best fitted for the accomplishment of this task. Having had the good fortune to spend seventeen of the best years of his life in India, he owed much to native learning; but he richly repaid the debt by doing more than any other scholar to reveal to the Indians of to-day the history of their past.
Years before I made his personal acquaintance I had heard much about Bühler from Benfey, who often spoke with pride of the achievements of his distinguished pupil. I can still remember some of the very words Benfey used in describing the circumstances of Bühler's appointment at Bombay. It was not till 1883, some three years after his return to Europe, that I first met him. Since then I had every two or three years opportunities of frequent personal intercourse with him at successive Oriental Congresses, especially at Stockholm, London, and Geneva, as well as on the occasion of his visits to England. In August 1887 I came across him by accident in the street at Lucerne. It was then I learnt that, as his wife was a Swiss lady, he was in the habit of spending a considerable part of his vacations in Switzerland, and of taking hard rowing exercise on the Swiss lakes after his exhausting labours at Vienna. His fondness for this form of exercise, which he indulged in for the sake of his health, was destined to bring about his untimely death. Since 1893, when he asked me to contribute to his Encyclopædia the part on 'Vedic Mythology,' I also had occasion to correspond with him a good deal in connexion with that work. These opportunities furnished sufficient data, I think, for forming a fairly correct estimate of his character. He struck me as having a peculiarly scientific cast of mind. But with this was combined an intellectual enthusiasm which caused him to be perpetually on the watch for whatever was calculated to promote Indian studies in every direction. Though of a thoroughly matter-of-fact temperament, he was not altogether lacking in sentiment. This betrayed itself in the emotion with which he used to speak of what he owed to the teaching and inspiration of Benfey. The special interest he seemed to take in the pupils of his old guru doubtless sprang from the same source. His high-mindedness always deterred him from doing or saying anything against those to whom he felt he owed a debt of gratitude. Nor did he stoop to personal controversy. But had he ever been unjustifiably attacked, his aggressor would probably have had cause to repent his temerity. For Bühler, as he told me himself, kept a record of the blunders which he found in the work of other scholars, and which he might have felt compelled to refer to in self-defence.
One quality which especially distinguished Bühler was that power of concentration which enables a man to devote weeks or even months of intense application to the decipherment of an inscription without the certainty of any tangible result. Such labour, though sometimes apparently fruitless, serves to sharpen and strengthen the mental powers, and it is only those who are capable of it who can hope to become really great scholars. This quality was possessed in an eminent degree by Benfey, and was undoubtedly fostered by Bühler, in his turn among pupils such as Dr. M. A. Stein, who has done such valuable archæological work in Kashmir. The parampará of teachers becomes really fruitful by the cultivation of such qualities and the propagation of scientific method and accuracy, rather than by the formation of schools, which by their very nature must suffer from one-sidedness. Thus Bühler's death is to be deplored not only as a direct loss to learning, but also because of the indirect disadvantage resulting from the premature removal of a great trainer of scholars. Altogether Bühler came near to the ideal of what a Sanskritist of the present day should be. Like Colebrooke, the great founder of Sanskrit scholarship, he combined with universal learning and untiring industry, distinguished practical ability. This enabled him to acquire a vast knowledge of the concrete data of modern Indian life, a knowledge particularly valuable to scholarship in a country which has experienced for three thousand years a continuity in literature and civilization which is unparalleled in any other branch of the Aryan race. Bühler thus became capable of understanding and illuminating the intellectual and social history of India as a whole to an extent which will hardly ever be equalled.
