He was a precocious, very serious little boy; he turned steadily into an astonishingly learned teenager, tall, well built, with long hair and an early bright-red beard that added to his grave and forbidding appearance. ‘Knowledge is power,’ he declared on the flyleaf of his school exercise book, and added – for as well as having a working knowledge by the time he was fifteen of French, Italian, German and Greek, he, like all educated children then, knew Latin – ‘Nihil est melius quam vita diligentissima.’
He had a voracious appetite, an impassioned thirst, for all kinds of learning. He taught himself about the local geology and botany, he found a globe from which he could learn geography and foster a love for maps, he unearthed scores of textbooks from which he could take on the enormous burden of history; he observed and took pains to remember all the natural phenomena about him. His younger brothers would tell how he once awakened them late one night to show them the rising of the dog-star Sirius, whose orbit and appearance over the horizon he had calculated and that proved, to the family’s sleepy exultation, to be perfectly correct.
He particularly cherished encountering and interrogating people he met who proved to be living links with history: he once found an ancient who had known someone present at the proclamation ofWilliam and Mary in 1689; then again, his mother would recount over and over how she had heard tell of the victory at Waterloo; and when he had children himself he would allow them to be dandled on the knees of an elderly naval officer who was present when Napoleon agreed to surrender.
He left school at fourteen, as did most of the poorer children of the British Isles. There was no money for him to go on to the fee-paying grammar school in nearby Melrose, and in any case his parents enjoyed some confidence in the lad’s ability to teach himself – by pursuing, as he had vowed, the vita diligentissima. Their hopes proved well founded: James continued to amass more and more knowledge, if only (as he would admit) for the sake of knowledge itself, and often in the most eccentric of ways.
He engaged in furious digs at a multitude of archaeological sites all over the borderlands (which, being close to Hadrian’s Wall, was a treasure-trove of buried antiquities); he made attempts to teach the local cows to respond to calls in Latin; he would read out loud, by the light of a minute oil lamp, the works of a Frenchman with the grand name of Théodore Agrippa d’Aubigné, and translate for his family, who gathered about him, fascinated.
He once tried to invent water-wings from bundles of pond iris, tied them to his arms but was turned upside-down by more buoyancy than he had calculated, and would have drowned (he was a non-swimmer) had not his friends rescued him by pulling him from the lake with his five-foot-long bow-tie. He memorized hundreds of phrases in Romany, the language of the passing gypsies; he learned bookbinding; he taught himself to embellish his own writings with elegant little drawings and flourishes and curlicues, rather like the monkish illuminators of the Middle Ages.
By seventeen this ‘argumentative, earnest, naïve’ young Scot was employed in his home town as an assistant head schoolmaster, eagerly passing on the knowledge that he had so keenly gained; by twenty he was a fully fledged headmaster of the local Subscription Academy; and with his brother Alexander he became a leading member of that most Victorian and Scottish of bodies, the local Mutual Improvement Institute. He gave his first lecture, ‘Reading, Its Pleasures and Advantages’, and went on to present learned papers to the local Literary and Philosophical Society on his new passions of phonetics, on the origins of pronunciations, on the foundations of the Scottish tongue, and, once he had discovered its delights, on the magic of Anglo-Saxon.
And yet all of this early promise seemed suddenly doomed, first by the onset of love and then by the upset of tragedy. For in 1861, when he was just twenty-four, Murray met and the following year married a handsome but delicate infant-school music teacher named Maggie Scott. Their wedding picture shows Murray a strangely tall, vaguely simian figure in his ill-fitting frock coat and baggy trews, a man with hugely long knee-brushing arms, an unkempt beard, hair already thinning by the peak, eyes narrow and intense; neither happy nor unhappy but full of thought, his mind seemingly filled with a kind of distracted foreboding.
Two years later they had a baby girl whom they christened Anna. But, as was wretchedly commonplace at the time, she died in infancy. Maggie Murray herself then fell gravely ill with consumption and was said by the Hawick doctors to be unlikely to withstand the rigours of another long Scottish winter. The recommended treatment was to sojourn in the South of France but that, given Murray’s tiny schoolmaster’s wage, was quite out of the question.
Instead the forlorn couple took off for London, and modest lodgings in Peckham. Murray, now twenty-seven, had to his bitter disappointment been forced by his domestic circumstances to abandon all of his current intellectual pursuits, all of his digging and delving and pronouncements on linguistics and on phonetics and the origins of words – on which topic he was then enjoying a lively correspondence with the notable scholar Alexander Melville Bell, father of the infinitely more famous Alexander Graham Bell. Economic necessity and marital duty – though he was devoted to Maggie, and never complained – had pressed him to become instead, and with a dreary predictability, a clerk in a London bank. With his employment, in starched cuffs, green eye-shade and a high stool at the back of the head office of the Chartered Bank of India, it seemed as though the story might have come to an ignominious end.
Not so. Within just a matter of months he was back in the traces. He had renewed his eccentric pursuit of learning – studying Hindustani and Achaemenian on his daily commute, trying to determine by their accents from which region of Scotland various London policemen came, lecturing on ‘The Body and Its Architecture’ before the Camberwell Congregational Church (where, as a confirmed and lifelong teetotaller, he was a keen member of their Temperance League), and even noting with amused detachment, while his sickly and well-loved Maggie was dying, that in her nightly delirium she lapsed into the broad Scots dialect of her childhood, and abandoned the more refined tones of a schoolteacher. That small discovery, that marginal addition to his learning, went some way to helping him through the misery of her subsequent death.
And one would be right in wondering about this detachment: a year after her death Murray was engaged to another young woman and, a year later still, married. While he had clearly loved and admired Maggie Scott, it was soon abundantly clear that here in Ada Ruthven, whose father worked for the Great Indian Peninsular Railway and was an admirer of Humboldt, and whose mother claimed to have been to school with Charlotte Brontë, was a woman who was far more his social and intellectual equal. They were to remain devoted and to have eleven children together, ten of whom bore the middle name Ruthven, according to the wishes of the father-in-law.
A letter that Murray then wrote in 1867, his thirtieth year, applying for a post with the British Museum, offers some of the flavour of his barely believable range of knowledge (as well as his unabashed candour in telling people about it).
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 & 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 and 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, Provençal and 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, 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 the Russian. In the Persian, Achaemenian Cuneiform, & Sanscrit branches, I know for the purposes of Comparative Philology. I have sufficient knowledge of Hebrew and Syriac to read at sight the Old Testament and Peshito; to a less degree I know Aramaic Arabic, Coptic and Phoenician to the point where it is left by Genesius.