But sub-editors too, daunted by the huge number of quotation slips that had arrived by the sackful during the volunteers' more productive days, started abandoning ship as well. And though Furnivall did, as he had promised, successfully oversee the making of the third part of the Basis of Comparison, for the letters M to Z, it was not long before the Philological Society itself began to get cold feet too.
A steadily decreasing official enthusiasm for the project begins to make itself evident in the Society's journal, the Transactions, as the years of Furnivall's editorship continued. In the beginning the journal's pages were filled with exuberant and confident reports of the `tremendous progress' and `great strides' and `significant achievements' that were being realized by the project's managers, as quotation slips were being solicited, shades of meaning determined, definitions written, entire letters ticked off the list. But slowly, towards the end of the 1860s, the purpose begins to falter. The year-end assessments of progress became shorter, their language less robust, the showof optimism less evident. By 1872 Furnivall was forced to report to his masters that `progress in the Dictionary has been so slight that no fresh report in detail is needed'.
Books and papers held by the volunteers—many of them had been sent volumes from the Philological Society's library, which they would use to do their research—were now being returned by readers too exasperated, weary, or disenchanted to go on. Before long the lobby of Furnivall's house at No. 3 St George's Square was `cumbered with boxes and bundles of every size and form'; in 1879 more than two tons of papers were sent in as the wholesale abandonment of the project proceeded. Moreover, it was now clear that other disenchanted volunteers had simply left their papers and their books where they stood—had consigned them to lumber rooms, taken them away on holiday and left them behind in faraway hotels and boarding houses, dumped them in rubbish bins, lost them. By the mid-1870s, the work of thousands had been dispersed across half the world like wind-borne pollen: if the project ever were to be revived, it would take an immense amount of diligent searching to bring it all together again.
But it was worse than that. A terminal crisis was looming. `The general belief', wrote an editor at the Athenaeum, `is that the project will not be carried out.' If the great dictionary project was to continue, it would require the appointment of a far more organized, less volatile, and better-tempered leader at its helm.
The Society was already recognizing this as early as 1874, when its President, the mathematician Alexander Ellis, wailed that he thought the body `less fitted to compile a dictionary than to get the materials [for it] collected'. Then again a year later the sub-editor who had worked on the letter F (and who had supervised a second series of specimen pages, on the words Fa 11 to Face), the Reverend George Wheelwright, suggested, in a briskly worded pamphlet, that Furnivall make up his mind about the future of the scheme.
He should, the cleric said, promptly find a neweditor, assure everyone that they were not on `a Fools chace which should end only in a general fiasco', and by so doing bring to an end `the intolerable suspense under which we all groan'. Wheelwright had spent ten years of his life dedicated to the Dictionary: he was not about to see it fail without someone, somewhere, making an effort to save it.
As early as 1871—three years before his Society became publicly exasperated, four before Wheelwright's outburst—Furnivall himself had come to appreciate howhopeless he was at running the project, and had tried to find a replacement. He knewhe had lost sub-editors who had initially agreed to supervise the words beginning with the letters A, I, J, N, O, P, and W—leaving fully one quarter of the alphabet uncovered—and he wrote that he was now bound to look `for a fresh editor for the whole work'.
He had first approached Henry Sweet, a notoriously rude phonetician who was later used by George Bernard Shaw as a model for Henry Higgins in Pygmalion—later the play and film My Fair Lady. But Sweet had turned him down flat. Furnivall then approached Henry Nicol, another eminent and rather calmer philologist, who was amenable to the idea, and rather flattered. But when he looked at the size of the task ahead he reminded himself that he was chronically unwell, and in any case too busy with other tasks—and so Furnivall had to look elsewhere. It was fully four years later that he at last came upon the man who would pull the project back from the brink, and propel it to its ultimate success. It began with a chance remark made to him at a Philological Society meeting. It ended with Furnivall concluding decisively that the man who had made the remark would, could, and indeed should be the ideal candidate for the post of new editor. He began immediately to work `like a busy spider', as he later put it, spinning the web that would eventually ensnare his candidate and keep him tightly enmeshed in the Byzantine complexities of the English language for the rest of his days.
The man was James Augustus Henry Murray. What he had said to Furnivall, when he learned of the difficulties the Secretary was having in finding a new editor for the Dictionary, was simple, no more in essence than, `I rather wish I could have a go at it.' He had not intended the remark to be taken seriously. After all, he was no more than an amateur philologist, interested in whiling away his evenings musing on the origins of dialect. He was 38 years old, a former bank clerk who was by now employed rather more happily as a teacher at the Mill Hill School in north London. He was a lowland Scot, a linen draper's son, from the Teviotdale village of Denholm, near Hawick, in Roxburghshire. He had been brought up in rural isolation, his family unmoneyed, his life unsophisticated, his future unpromising. `I am a nobody,' he would write in later years, when fame had begun to creep up on him. `Treat me as a solar myth, or an echo, or an irrational quantity, or ignore me altogether.'
But there was no ignoring him, for James Murray was in all ways—and in particular, in intellectual ways—unforgettably remarkable. He was remarkable even in an age that produced a disproportionate share, or so it seems today, of exceptionally clever men. He has a reputation still as a towering figure in British scholarship. He was Calvinist in his spiritual outlook, polymathic in his interests and his competences, forbidding in his appearance—a fiery red beard lent him the air of faint bellicosity—and he was all too casually aware of the combined effect that these formidable attributes of looks and brains had on those around him. He radiated a magisterial air of righteous authority—rather, as it turned out, as the dictionary that he would make would also radiate in its own time.
And he, at long last, was the man who would make all the difference.
3
The General Officer Commanding
I have to state that Philology, both Comparative and special, has been my favourite pursuit during the whole of my life, and that I possess a general acquaintance with the languages and literature of the Aryan and Syro-Arabic classes—not indeed to say that I am familiar with all or nearly all of these, but that I possess that general lexical & structural knowledge which makes the intimate knowledge only a matter of a little application. With several I have a more intimate acquaintance as with the Romance tongues, Italian, French, Catalan, Spanish, Latin & in a less degree Portuguese, Vaudois, ProvencËal & various dialects. In the Teutonic branch, I am tolerably familiar with Dutch (having at my place of business correspondence to read in Dutch, German, French & occasionally other languages), Flemish, German and Danish. In Anglo-Saxon and Moeso-Gothic my studies have been much closer, I having prepared some works for publication upon these languages. I know a little of the Celtic, and am at present engaged with the Sclavonic, having obtained a useful knowledge of Russian. In the Persian, Achaemenian Cuneiform, & Sanscrit branches, I know for the purposes of Comparative Philology. I have sufficient knowledge of Hebrew & Syriac to read at sight the Old Testament and Peshito; to a less degree I know Aramaic Arabic, Coptic and Phenecian to the point where it was left by Gesenius.