habit of lying, the latter because he had no other vent for invention. He describes
with great regret his leaving school at so early an age; his volcanic passion of
anger; his self-distrust; his periods of abandon; his passion to make a success of
art though he did not of life; his spells of self-despair and cynicism; his periods
of desolation in his single life; his habit of story-telling; his wrestling with the
problem of theology and God; the conflict between his philosophy and his love
of the girls, etc.
From a private school in Leipzig, where he had shown all a boy's tact in finding
what his masters thought the value of each subject they taught; where he had
joined in the vandalism of using a battering-ram to break a way to the hated
science apparatus and to destroy it; feeling that the classical writers were
overpraised; and where at the age of sixteen he had appeared several times in
public as a reciter of his own poems, Max Müller returned to Leipzig and
entered upon the freedom of university life there at the age of seventeen. For
years his chief enjoyment was music.[51] He played the piano well, heard
everything he could in concert or opera, was an oratorio tenor, and grew more
and more absorbed in music, so that he planned to devote himself altogether to it
and also to enter a musical school at Dessau, but nothing came of it. At the
university he saw little of society, was once incarcerated for wearing a club
ribbon, and confesses that with his boon companions he was guilty of practises
which would now bring culprits into collision with authorities. He fought three
duels, participated in many pranks and freakish escapades, but nevertheless
attended fifty-three different courses of lectures in three years. When Hegelism
was the state philosophy, he tried hard to understand it, but dismissed it with the
sentiments expressed by a French officer to his tailor, who refused to take the
trousers he had ordered to be made very tight because they did not fit so closely
that he could not get into them. Darwin attracted him, yet the wildness of his
followers repelled. He says, "I confess I felt quite bewildered for a time and
began to despair altogether of my reasoning powers." He wonders how young
minds in German universities survive the storms and fogs through which they
pass. With bated breath he heard his elders talk of philosophy and tried to lay
hold of a word here and there, but it all floated before his mind like mist. Later
he had an Hegelian period, but found in Herbart a corrective, and at last decided
upon Sanskrit and other ancient languages, because he felt that he must know
something that no other knew, and also that the Germans had then heard only the
after-chime and not the real striking of the bells of Indian philosophy. From
twenty his struggles and his queries grew more definite, and at last, at the age of
twenty-two, he was fully launched upon his career in Paris, and later went to