Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 11.djvu/211

Rh to accompany the Hessian minister to the headquarters of the allied army. In 1814 he was sent to Paris to demand restitution of the books carried off by the French, and in 1814-15 he attended the congress of Vienna as secretary of legation. On his return he was again sent to Paris on the same errand as before. Meanwhile Wilhelm had received an appointment in the Cassel library, and in 1816 Jacob was made second librarian under Volkel. On the death of Volkel in 1828 the brothers expected to be ad vanced to the first and second librarianships respectively, and were much dissatisfied when the first place was given to Rommel, keeper of the archives. So they removed next year to Gb ttingen, where Jacob received the appointment of professor and librarian, Wilhelm that of under-librarian. Jacob Grimm lectured on legal antiquities, historical grammar, literary history, and diplomatics, explained Old German poems, and commented on the Germania of Tacitus. At this period he is described as small and lively in figure, with a harsh voice, speaking a broad Hessian dialect. His powerful memory enabled him to dispense with the &quot; heft &quot; which most German professors rely on, and he spoke extem pore, referring only occasionally to a few names and dates written on a slip of paper. He himself regretted that he had begun the work of teaching so late in life, and as a lecturer he was not successful ; he had no idea of digesting his facts and suiting them to the comprehension of his hearers ; and even the brilliant, terse, and eloquent passages which abound in his writings lost much of their effect when jerked out in the midst of a long array of dry facts. In 1837, being one of the seven professors who signed a protest against the king of Hanover s abrogation of the constitution which had been established some years before, he was dismissed from his professorship, and banished from the kingdom of Hanover. He returned to his native Cassel together with his brother, who had also signed the protest, and remained there till, in 1840, they accepted an invitation from the king of Prussia to remove to Berlin, where they both received professorships, and were elected members of the Academy of Sciences. Not being under any obligation to lecture, Jacob very seldom did so, but together with his brother worked at the great dictionary, the plan of which had already been partly developed. During their stay at Cassel Jacob regularly attended the meetings of the academy, where he read papers on the most varied subjects. The best known of these are those on Lachmann, Schiller, and his brother Wilhelm (who died in 1859), on old age, and on the origin of language. He also described his im pressions of Italian and Scandinavian travel, interspersing his more general observations with linguistic details, as is the case in all his works. He died in 1863, working up to the last. Grimm s physical constitution was an excellent one. He possessed in the highest degee that Teutonic energy and endurance which are as essential to the sedentary student as to the pioneer in other regions of human activity. He was never ill, and worked on all day, without haste and without pause. He himself (in his biography) speaks of his &quot; iron industry.&quot; He was not at all impatient of interruption, but seemed rather to be refreshed by it, returning to his work without effort. He wrote for press with great rapidity, and hardly ever made corrections. He never revised what he had written, remarking with a certain wonder of his brother, &quot; Wilhelm reads his manuscripts over again before sending them to press ! &quot; He often started on a journey which he had determined upon only the day before. His tempera ment was uniformly cheerful, and he was easily amused. He took a keen interest in politics, and when the newspapers arrived, he would often read them through at once, break ing off his work for the purpose. Outside his own special work he had a marked taste for botany, and always liked to have flowers about him while working, a taste which was shared by his brother. The spirit which animated his work ia best described by himself at the end of his autobiography. &quot; Nearly all my labours have been devoted, either directly or indirectly, to the investigation of our earlier language, poetry, and laws. These studies may have appeared to many, and may still appear, useless ; to me they have always seemed a noble and earnest task, definitely and inseparably connected with our common fatherland, and calculated to foster the love of it. My principle has always been in these investigations to under value nothing, but to utilize the small for the illustration of the great, the popular tradition for the elucidation of the written monuments. &quot; We may, in fact, sum up Grimm s tendencies by saying that he was inspired by an intense enthusiasm for research, guided into definite channels by a riot less enthusiastic love and veneration for everything German, this word including, in its widest sense, all the great brotherhood of the Teutonic nations, and limited by his decided predilection for history and antiquities. It will be observed that, whenever he refers to living dialects or traditions, it is in order to throw light on the past, not the reverse. Even j.i his great German dictionary the historical tendency strongly predominates. The purely scientific side of Grimm s character developed itself but slowly, and it was long before he applied to the study of etymology and inflexions the system and method Savigny had taught him to develop in legal history. He seems to have felt the want of definite principles of ety mology without being able to discover them, and indeed even in the first edition of his grammar (1819) he seems to be often groping in the dark, and to have but a vague idea of the necessity of rigorous principles of letter-comparison. As early as 1815 we find A. W. Schlegel reviewing the Altdeutsche Wdlder (a periodical published by the two brothers) very severely, condemning the lawless etymologi cal combinations it contained, and insisting on the necessity of strict philological method and a fundamental investi gation of the laws of language, especially in the corre spondence of sounds. This criticism is said to have had a considerable influence on the direction of Grimm s studies. The first work he published, Ueber den altdeutschen Meistergesang (1811), was of a purely literary character. But even here we see the difference between the more passive contemplation of the aesthetic literary critic and the activity of the investigator who is always seeking definite results and definite laws. In this essay Grimm showed that Minnesang and Meistersang were really one form of poetry, of which they merely represented different stages of development, and also announced his important discovery of the invariable division of the Lied into three strophic parts. His text-editions were mostly prepared in common with his brother. In 1812 they published the two ancient frag ments of the Hildebrandslied and the Weissenbrunner Gebef, Jacob having discovered what till then had never been suspected the alliteration in these poems. However, Jacob had but little taste for text-editing, and, as he him self confessed, the evolving of a critical text gave him little pleasure. He therefore left this department to others, especially Lachmann, who soon turned his brilliant critical genius, trained in the severe school of classical philology, to Old and Middle High German poetry and metre. Both brothers were attracted from the beginning by all national poetry, whether in the form of epics, ballads, or popular tales. They published in 1816-18 an analysis and critical sifting of the oldest epic traditions of the Germanic races under the title of Deutsche Sagen. At the same time they collected all the popular tales they could findj partly from 