Ideas

by Peter Watson

  The effect of the Bhagavad Gita was no less profound. Its poetry, its wisdom, its sheer complexity and richness brought about a major change in attitudes to India, the East and its capabilities. ‘It was a great surprise,’ wrote the French scholar Jean-Denis Lanjuinas, ‘to find among these fragments of an extremely ancient epic poem from India, along with the system of metempsychosis, a brilliant theory on the existence of God and the immortality of the soul, all the sublime doctrines of the Stoics…a completely spiritual pantheism, and finally the vision of all-in-God.’75 Others found precursors of Spinoza and Berkeley in India, and Lanjuinas himself went on to argue that the Hitopadesha (instructions in politics, friendship and worldly wisdom, dating back to the third century BC) contained one of the great moral treatises of all times, on a par with the scriptures and the Church Fathers. These verdicts were confirmed by Friedrich Schlegel who, in Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier (‘on the Language and Wisdom of the Indies’), discussed the metaphysical traditions of India on an equal footing with Greek and Latin ideas. This was far more important then than we may feel now, because, against a background of deism and doubt, such an approach allowed that the Indians–the inhabitants of the far-off East–had as thorough a knowledge and belief in the true God as did Europeans. This was quite at variance with what the church taught. Jones had speculated that Sanskrit, Greek and Latin had a common origin, but there were those who suspected that Sanskrit, which doesn’t mean ‘holy writing’ but ‘perfected’, from samskrta, was actually the original tongue spoken after the world had been created by God. What was the relation between Brahman and Abraham?

  The sheer richness of Sanskrit also went against the Enlightenment belief that languages had begun in poverty and gradually grown more elaborate.76 This brought about a growing realisation that Vico had been right, and that the structure of languages could reveal a great deal about the antiquity of man. In turn, this launched the great age of philology, as it was then called, in the nineteenth century, as grammar was studied as well as vocabulary, to reveal groups of languages–for example, the separation of the Germanic languages from Greek, Latin and Balto Slavic.77 Here the work of Schlegel and Franz Bopp influenced Wilhelm von Humboldt, the minister who helped establish the first chairs in Sanskrit in Germany in 1818.78 Humboldt in particular was interested in what language could teach us about the psychology of different peoples. Many religious souls at the time remained convinced that the earliest (and most perfect) language had to be Hebrew, or something very like it, because it was the language of the Chosen People. Bopp turned his back on these preconceptions and showed how complex Sanskrit was even thousands of years ago, in the process throwing doubt on the very idea that Hebrew was the original tongue. It was in this way that language was recognised as having a natural history rather than a sacred history, that language studies were, in effect, susceptible of scientific inquiry.79

  Schelling took the ideas of Jones one step further. In his 1799 lecture on the Philosophie der Mythologie he proposed that, just as there must have been a ‘mother tongue’, so there must have been one mythology in the world shared by all peoples. He thought that it was the task of German scholars trained in languages to create, for modern Europe, ‘a fusion of the mythological traditions of all humanity…All the legends of India and Greece, of the Scandinavians and the Persians “had to be” accepted as components of a new universal religion that would regenerate a world distracted by rationalism.’80 In much the same vein, Hippolyte Taine took the view that the concordance between Buddhism and Christianity was ‘the greatest event in history’, because it revealed the root myths of the world.81 India was so big, so alive and its religions so sophisticated that it was no longer enough simply to curse pagans, to dismiss them and to hope that they might be one day converted. Christianity had to assimilate a heterodoxy millennia-old and still very much alive.82

  One final, fundamental way in which the discovery deeply affected people was in the notion of ‘becoming’. If religions were at different stages of development, and yet all linked in some mysterious way–only glimpsed at so far–did this mean that God, instead of just being, could himself be said to be ‘becoming’, as the rest of life on earth was understood in the classic Graeco-Christian tradition? This was clearly a major question. The most important aspect of all these varied views was that deism was given a new lease of life. God came to be seen, not in an anthropomorphic sense, but as an abstract metaphysical entity. There was, once again, a very real, very large difference between God and man.83

  The growing understanding that the languages of mankind were related in a systematic way, occurring as it did at much the same time as the new classifications in biology, devised by Linnaeus, together with the advances in Huttonian geology (see below, Chapter 31), played an important part in reinforcing early ideas about what would become known as evolution. But the Oriental renaissance also played a vital role in a quite different development, one that dominates life even today. This was its links to the origins of the romantic movement.

  The most obvious and most virile link was between Indic studies and German romanticism. Indic studies proved popular in Germany for broadly nationalistic reasons. Put bluntly, it seemed to German scholars that the Aryan/Indian/Persian tradition linked in with the original barbarian invasions of the Roman empire from the east and, together with the myths of the Scandinavians, provided an alternative (more northerly) tradition to the Greek and Latin Mediterranean classicism that had dominated European life and thought for the previous 2,500 years (see chapter10). Furthermore, thesimilaritiesbetween Buddhism and Christianity, the Hindu ideas of a world soul, all this seemed to the Germans as a primitive form of revelation, in fact the original form, out of which Judaism and Christianity might have grown, but which meant that God’s real purpose was hidden somewhere in the Eastern religions, that the first religion in the world, before the churches, was somehow to be found in the ancient writings of India. Such a view implies that there was a single God for all mankind, and that there was a world mythology, the understanding of which would be fundamental. In Herder’s terms, this ancestral mythology was ‘the childhood dreams of our species’.84

  A further factor which influenced romanticism was that the original Indian scriptures were written in poetry. The idea became popular, therefore, that poetry was ‘the mother tongu’, that verse was the original way in which wisdom was transmitted from God to mankind (‘Man is an animal that sings’). Poetry, it was thought, was the original language of Eden, and it was through the ancient poetry of India that the Edenic world could be rediscovered. In this way the philologists and poets combined to produce what Schwab called ‘the revenge of plurality on unity’.85 At the very moment that the scientists were seeking to bring the world under control, seeing it operate according to fewer and fewer rules, at a time when theories of progress looked forward to a narrowing of experience, as societies were all expected to develop in one and the same direction, the philologists and poets went the other way and sought the regeneration of society through new religion. Their view was that there was a primitive unity to the human race, but it had, over time, developed different religions that were equally valid, its legends and myths and practices equally authoritative, equally suited to the environments and countries in which they held sway. According to this argument, there had been an original monotheism, which had become dispersed into polytheism, meaning that the content of revelation was not, in principle, different from that in mythology. ‘All the legends of India and Greece, of the Scandinavians and the Persians “had to be” accepted as components of a new universal religion that would regenerate a world distracted by rationalism.’86

  The range of poets, writers and philosophers who came under the influence of these views spanned the Atlantic. Emerson and Thoreau were steeped in Buddhism. One of Emerson’s first poems was called ‘Brahma’, and was inspired by the Bhagavad Gita. His Journals contain many references to Zoroaster, Confucius, the Hindus and the Veda
s. On 1 October 1848 he wrote: ‘I owed…a magnificent day to the Bhagavad Geeta. It was the first of books; it was as if an empire spake to us, nothing small or unworthy, but large, serene, consistent, the voice of an old intelligence which in another age and climate had pondered and thus disposed of the same questions which exercise us.’87 Thoreau left Emerson his collection of Oriental books. Whitman confessed he had read Hindu poetry in preparation for his own. Goethe learned Persian and wrote in the preface to the West-Ostliche Divan: ‘Here I want to penetrate to the first origin of human races, when they still received celestial mandates from god in terrestrial languages.’88 Heine studied Sanskrit under Schlegel at Bonn and under Bopp in Berlin.89 As he wrote: ‘Our lyrics are aimed at singing the Orient.’ Schlegel believed that the Aryans, the original inhabitants of India, were ‘attracted’ to the North–i.e., were the ancestors of the Germans and Scandinavians. Both Schlegel and Ferdinand Eckstein, another German Orientalist, believed that the Indic, Persian and Hellenic epics rested on the same fables which formed the basis of the Nibelungenlied, the great medieval German epic of revenge, which Wagner was to rely on for his musical drama The Ring.90 Eckstein sought ‘an anterior Christianity…in the antiquities of paganism’.91 ‘For Schleiermacher, as for the entire circle around Novalis, the source of all religion “can be found”, according to Ricarda Huch, “in the unconscious or in the Orient, from whence all religions came”.’92

  Schopenhauer’s encounter with the East transformed him. His view of Buddhism was that ‘Never has myth come closer to the truth, nor will it.’93 He was convinced that ‘our religions are not taking nor will they take root in India; the primitive wisdom of the human race will not allow itself to be diverted from its course by some escapade that occurred in Galilee.’94 Christianity, but not Judaism, Schopenhauer said, ‘is Indian in spirit, and therefore more than probably of Indian origin, although only indirectly, through Egypt’.95 Not entirely logically, he then proceeded to examine what he saw as the Indo-Iranian origins of Christianity: ‘Although Christianity, in essential respects, taught only what all Asia knew long before, and even better, yet for Europe it was a new and great revelation.’ And he went on: ‘The New Testament…must have some sort of Hindu origin; its ethics, which translate morals into asceticism, its pessimism, and its avatar all attest to such an origin…Christian doctrine, born of Hindu wisdom, had completely covered the old trunk of a grosser Judaism completely uncongenial to it.’96

  Lamartine confessed that Indian philosophy moved him most of all. ‘[It] eclipses all others for me: it is the oceans, we are only clouds…I read, reread, and read again…I cried out, I closed my eyes, I was overwhelmed with admiration…’97 He had plans–never realised–for a great sequence of poems, ‘an epic of the soul’, which he described as Hindoustanique.98 ‘From it [India] one inhales a breath at once holy, tender, and sad, which seems to me to have recently passed from an Eden closed to mankind.’99 For Lamartine, the discovery of India and its literature was not merely ‘a new wing to be added to old libraries; it was a new land to be hailed in the cheers of shipwrecked men’.100 For that other great French writer, Victor Hugo, the Orient both attracted and repelled. In September 1870, when he launched his address ‘To the Germans’, in which he tried to convince them to spare Paris, during the siege, he made a comparison that many others had made, and which, indeed, Germany liked to make about itself. ‘Germany is to the West what India is to the East, a sort of great forebear. Let us venerate her.’101 His poetry contained many references to Ellora, the Ganges, Brahmans, an ‘immense wheel’, and magical birds based on Farid al-Din’s Mantiq ut-Tair (The Conference of the Birds).102 Gustave Flaubert wrote of ‘an immense Indian forest where life throbs in every atom’,103 while Verlaine spent his vacations ‘plunged into Hindu mythology’.104

  In 1865, the French (self-appointed) count, Joseph-Arthur de Gobineau, a notorious racial theorist, published Les religions et les philosophies dans l’Asie centrale (1865), the central tenet of which was that all European thought originated in Asia. Gobineau even travelled to Persia in 1855 while he was working on the book, to verify his thesis.105 He did not agree with others that the northern European languages were descended from India but he did think that its peoples were. For him the Aryans were the nobility of mankind and he considered the word ‘Aryan’ related to the German Ehre (which means ‘honour’, ‘uprightness’). In the final part of On the Inequality of Human Races, which he called ‘The capacity of the native German races’, he argued that the Germanic Aryan is sacred, the race of the lords of the earth, while in the conclusion he announced that ‘The Germanic race has been furnished with all the energy of the Aryan variety…After it the white species had nothing powerful and active to offer.’106

  At the end of his life, Wagner ‘rushed into Gobineau’s arms’.107 He met the man and wrote an introduction to his collected works. Wagner found the Frenchman’s philosophy and ‘science’ congenial to his own aim of displacing French-Italian opera as the centre of the canon and to fashion instead ‘a music of the future’ that promoted a radically different tradition–German epic, German paganism, ‘the unalterable source of purity’.108 ‘As Wagner recounts in My Life, it was while working on the orchestration of Die Walküre in 1855 that the event occurred which could not fail to fulfil his destiny: “Burnouf’s Introduction to the History of Indian Buddhism interested me most among my books, and I found material in it for a dramatic poem, which has stayed in my mind ever since…to the mind of the Buddha the past life (in a former incarnation) of every being who appears before him stands revealed as plainly as the present”.’109 Wagner’s diaries are punctuated with references to the Buddha and Buddhist concepts. ‘Everything is strange to me, and I often cast a nostalgic glance toward the country of Nirvana. But for me Nirvana again becomes, very quickly, Tristan.’110 Elements of the Ramayana occur in Parsifal, and at one stage the composer planned a drama to be taken from the book Stimmen vom Ganges (Voices of the Ganges).111

  The Oriental renaissance, then, was many things. It threw new light on religion, on history, on time, on myth, on the relations between the peoples of the world. In the middle of the Enlightenment, and the industrial revolution, it breathed new life into poetry and the poetic and aesthetic approach to human affairs. In the short run it was one of the forces that helped create the romantic revolution, the subject of the next chapter. But in the long run the discovery of the common origins of Sanskrit and Greek and Latin would form part of the modern scientific synthesis, linking genetics, archaeology and linguistics, which has taught us a great deal about the peopling of our world, surely one of the greatest and most important aspects of our history. This represents a significant mind-shift that, too often, is ignored against the backdrop of the other developments in the eighteenth century.

  30

  The Great Reversal of Values–Romanticism

  To Chapter 30 Notes and References

  The French composer Hector Berlioz was a remarkable man. ‘Everything about him was unusual,’ says Harold Schonberg in his Lives of the Composers. ‘Almost single-handedly he broke up the European musical establishment. After him, music would never be the same.’1 Even as a student he stood out in a way that many people found shocking. ‘He believes in neither God nor Bach,’ said the composer-conductor-pianist Ferdinand Hiller, who described Berlioz in this way: ‘The high forehead, precipitously overhanging the deep-set eyes; the great, curving hawk nose; the thin, finely-cut lips; the rather short chin; the enormous shock of light brown hair, against the fantastic wealth of which the barber could do nothing–whoever had seen this head would never forget it.’ Indeed, Berlioz was almost as well known for his head, and his behaviour, as for his music. Ernest Legouvé, the French dramatist, was at a performance of Weber’s opera Der Freischütz one evening when a commotion broke out. ‘One of my neighbours rises from his seat and bending towards the orchestra shouts in a voice of thunder: “You don’t want two flutes there, you brutes! You want
two piccolos! Two piccolos, do you hear? Oh, the brutes!” Amidst the general tumult produced by this outburst, I turn around to see a young man trembling with passion, his hands clenched, his eyes flashing, and a head of hair–such a head of hair. It looked like an enormous umbrella of hair, projecting something like a moveable awning over a beak of a bird of prey.’ Contemporary cartoonists had a field day.2

  Berlioz was no mere show-off or exhibitionist, though there were those who thought that he was. Mendelssohn was one who found him affected. After their first meeting, he wrote: ‘This purely external enthusiasm, this desperation in the presence of women, the assumption of genius in capital letters, is insupportable to me.’3 This does no justice to Berlioz’s grand ambition, in particular his vision for the orchestra, which Yehudi Menuhin attributes to a new view of society.4 By common consent, Berlioz was the greatest orchestral innovator in history. By the 1830s, orchestras rarely consisted of more than sixty players. As early as 1825 Berlioz had brought together an orchestra of 150 but his ‘dream orchestra’, he confessed, would consist of 467, plus a chorus of 360. There were to be 242 strings, thirty harps, thirty pianos and sixteen French horns.5 Berlioz was far ahead of his time, the first of music’s true romantics, an enthusiast, a revolutionary, ‘a lawless despot’, the first of the conscious avant-gardists, as Schonberg puts it.6 ‘Uninhibited, highly emotional, witty, mercurial, picturesque, he was very conscious of his romanticism. He loved the very idea of romanticism: the urge for self-expression and the bizarre as opposed to the classic ideals of order and restraint.’7