An Autodidact.

Michael Gilleland of Laudator Temporis Acti posts this inspiring quote from Toynbee’s A Study of History, Vol. X:

Professor H.W. Bailey (natus A.D. 1899), a philologist of world-wide renown who in A.D. 1952 was the Professor of Sanskrit in the University of Cambridge, had awoken to consciousness as a child on a farm in Western Australia; and it would be hard to think of a more unpromising environment than this for producing a savant in the field of Oriental languages. The virgin soil of a recently colonized terra nullius exhaled no folk-lore to play the part of those local legends that had put Heinrich Schliemann, in his Varangian village, on the track of buried treasure; but the local human environment in Western Australia in the first decade of the twentieth century of the Christian Era did provide Harold Walter Bailey with the equivalent of the Universal History that had given the decisive turn to Heinrich Schliemann’s life when it had come into Schliemann’s hands on Christmas Day, 1829. The books that descended from Heaven upon the boy on the West Australian farm were ‘a set of seven volumes of an encyclopaedia (eagerly devoured) and four other volumes with lessons in French, Latin, German, Greek, Italian, and Spanish. Later came Arabic and Persian, out of which Persian took the lead (joined later to Sanskrit)’.

This was the trove that set Bailey’s curiosity on fire; and in A.D. 1943 the present writer induced the modest scholar to describe to him how his family used to watch him, with a benign but whimsical gaze, while, during the noonday rest from their common labours in the field, he would be conning his Avestan grammar in the shade of an Antipodean haystack. By the time when he was approaching the age to matriculate at a university, the young student of Oriental languages had become aware that he had reached the limit of what he could teach himself, unaided, out of the books on which he could lay hands. What was the next step? At the University of Western Australia at this date there was no provision for Oriental studies; for help in these, the would-be student would have to go on to Western Europe or to North America. So Bailey taught himself Latin and Greek; took these as his subjects at his own university; won a scholarship at the University of Western Australia to take him to the University of Oxford; and found at Oxford the help that he needed in order to complete his mastery of Oriental languages.

Yet even Cambridge, England, could not provide this Australian philologist with a chair specifically allocated to the Khotanese language, akin to Persian and to Sanskrit, which had been introduced into the Tarim Basin by the Sakas and which, while H.W. Bailey was studying Avestan under his haystack in Western Australia, had been recovered from oblivion by the labours of a series of Western pioneers in the Tarim Basin, culminating in the Hungarian-British archaeologist-explorer Sir Aurel Stein’s trove of religious and secular literature in known and still all but unknown languages, on which this path-finder had lighted in May 1907 in a Taoist shrine at Ch’ien Fo-tung (‘the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas’), near Tun-huang in the Su-lo-ho Basin, ‘a natural corridor’ leading from North-Western China into Central Asia, at the Western terminus of the former limes of a Sinic universal state; and Khotanese and Tokharian were the fields in which Bailey, in the next stage of his intellectual career, was to give the most impressive demonstrations of his prowess in advancing the frontiers of philological knowledge.

I am amused by Toynbee’s confident Balliol-bred “natus” and “limes,” and of course wowed by Bailey’s accomplishments. In a later post, Gilleland quotes this piquant bit from Alan Rush’s 1996 obituary of Bailey:

A task now facing Bailey’s colleagues is the elucidation of his rhyming diaries. When told at our last meeting that the course of a lifetime had transformed these into an epic of over 3,000 verses in a private language concocted from classical Sarmatian inscriptions, I asked Bailey why he was so fond of obscurity. “Well, the diaries are not really so obscure,” he said. “Indeed I’d say there’s hardly a line that could not have been understood by any Persian of the fourth century.”

Comments

  1. J.W. Brewer says

    ‘He was known for his immensely erudite lectures, and once confessed: “I have talked for ten and a half hours on the problem of one word without approaching the further problem of its meaning.”” (Note BTW that Toynbee was incorrect: Bailey was born in Wiltshire, only a two-hour railroad journey away from Oxford, and was 10 years old when his family removed to remote Western Australia.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Walter_Bailey

  2. J.W. Brewer says

    Re the rather sniffy “virgin soil of a … terra nullius,” the Bailey family farm appears to have been in the erstwhile territory (or “range” if that’s a better word) of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Njakinjaki. It is obviously not the young Bailey’s fault if he did not have access to any books describing their folklore or “local legends,” but that doesn’t mean that no such thing had existed.

  3. Trond Engen says

    That old idea of the impoverished intellectual environment of the farm. In my outpost of Europe, reading farmers with a wide range of intellectual interests have been common for a long time, and their offspring have gone from small countryside schools to become world class scientists, artists and politicians. I doubt other western countries were much different.

  4. Are we sure that that final 176-word sentence isn’t the result of a GPT-4 prompt for “produce an over-the-top parody of Toynbee”?

  5. Christopher Culver says

    A number of anecdotes about H.W. Bailey as a person have appeared in Iranian-linguistics publications, and the oldest living generation of Iranists can still recount their own firsthand impressions of him. A lifelong bachelor with that obsessive interest, I get the impression that he was autistic, though I have not yet heard anyone use that word. Interestingly, in spite of his Australian upbringing, I am told that Bailey spoke throughout his life with the Wiltshire accent of his birthplace and family, with Australian English having had no discernible impact on his speech.

  6. Limes” look good here.
    “Teminus of the […] limes” less good.

  7. I agree with Trond, dung is not the only thing that occupies a savage mind.

    Of course illiterate villagers (or savages) are illiterate, whatever exposure they have to whatever analog of what is written in our books they have, it is oral. Yes, a village with books is not the same as just a village (and what were those centers of intellectual life in antiquity if not large villages?:))).

  8. John Cowan says

    I could easily reconcile the two traditions of the Bailey origin myth by saying that although he was born under the Southern Cross (as Tolkien said of himself), there were no anglophones other than his parents for NNN miles in any direction, and so he natively acquired their Wiltshire accent, there being no other for him to acquire. (I believe this was actually true of some settlers in N.Z.)

  9. Trond Engen says

    @drasvi: Since I was talking about reading farmers specifically I limited my generalization to “Western countries”, i.e. countries that have had universal education since before modern telecommunications. From at least about the middle of the 19th century Norwegian farmers (not all, and not only farmers, of course) bought books and subscribed to newspapers and a wide variety of journals and magazines.

    But obviously this didn’t come from nowhere. There will always have been philosophers and inquiring minds, thinking deeply about and discussing religion, law, history, natural phenomena, language, etc. This must have been the constitutional base of society, the process that maintained, challenged and developed orally transmitted understanding of how the world works (and should work). The institution that brought these thinkers together was the þing. After the middle ages, judgment (or conclusion) was increasingly monopolized through the professional judiciary and the Church, but people didn’t stop thinking.or talking. And the role of priests and public officials (and their wives) was always a dual one. As educated people with a wide network they became a channel that brought new thinking and fresh scientific knowledge out to the broad population. The history of reading farmers owe a lot to the history of scientists in a priest’s collar. Eventually, the Church would also be the institution responsible for providing mass education with a curriculum far outside the Bible.

    And 19th century reading farmers weren’t a uniform block. It gave rise to artists and scientists, but also to lay preachers and prophets who were reacting to the secular message of the priests.

    Societies without this specific history of monopolized philosophy and mass education will have maintained older traditions to different degrees, but there will hardly be a society anywhere with no tradition for philosophy about itself and the wider worid, (The reported Pirahã taboo on discussing anything beyond the immediate is an obvious counterpoint, but it could also be a political reaction to the encroaching modern world, ideologically similar to reactionary movements in Christianity and Islam.)

  10. Trond Engen says

    That last paragraph may owe a lot to Graeber & Wenslow. It’s not a new revelation, not even to me, but I’ve been provoked to think clearer about it.

  11. David Marjanović says

    Interestingly, in spite of his Australian upbringing, I am told that Bailey spoke throughout his life with the Wiltshire accent of his birthplace and family, with Australian English having had no discernible impact on his speech.

    Sounds like another symptom of the autism spectrum to me: he consciously noticed all the Australian peculiarities and simply didn’t decide to actively adopt them.

  12. Of course illiterate villagers (or savages) are illiterate, whatever exposure they have to whatever analog of what is written in our books they have, it is oral.

    They’re otodidacts.

  13. Nice one!

  14. John Cowan says

    When I read, the content mostly passes through my eye and goes into my mind’s ear, bypassing the vocal cords altogether (hence my speed-reading abilities).

  15. The word autodidact generally seems fine to me, but often when I see (or even more, hear) “autodidactic,” I inwardly and sarcastically want to follow it up with “asphyxiation.” (You’re welcome.)

  16. Christopher Culver says

    “there were no anglophones other than his parents for NNN miles in any direction, and so he natively acquired their Wiltshire accent, there being no other for him to acquire.”

    That sounds quite plausible. Still, among Australian philologists who made a career at Oxford, it definitely sets H.W. Bailey apart from Bruce Mitchell, who did arrive in England with an Australian accent and kept it during his career.

  17. Bruce Mitchell
    Oh, one more Bruce from down under.

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