A History of Indian Literature v1.c7.s2.19

v1.c7.s2.19

It was fortunate for the young science of comparative philology and for the study of Sanskrit, which was then still for a long time connected with it, that the ingenious, versatile and influential Wilhelm von Humboldt showed enthusiasm for these studies. In the year 1821 he began to learn Sanskrit because, as he once wrote in a letter to Aug. Wilh. von Schlegel,¹ he had perceived "that without as thorough as possible a study of Sanskrit, very little can be accomplished either in philology or in that kind of history which is connected with it." And when Schlegel, in the year 1828, took a retrospect of Indian studies, he emphasized as particularly fortunate for the new science the fact that it "had found a warm friend and patron in Herrn Wilhelm von Humboldt." Schlegel's edition of the Bhagavadgītā had directed Humboldt's attention to this theosophical poem. He devoted special treatises to it, and at the time he wrote to Fr. von Gentz (1827): "It is perhaps the deepest and loftiest thing the world has to show." Later, in 1828, when he sent to his friend his work on the Bhagavadgītā, which had in the meantime been criticized by Hegel, he wrote that, however indifferent he might be to Hegel's judgment, he greatly valued the Indian philosophical poem. "I read the Indian poem," he writes, "for the first time in the country in Silesia, and my constant feeling while doing so was gratitude to Fate for having permitted me to live long enough to become acquainted with this book."¹