William Dwight Whitney and Ernest Renan: The Role of Orientalism in Franco-American Relations

Abstract

THE PRESENT ARTICLE is inspired by a hitherto unpublished letter of Ernest Renan (1823-1892) to William Dwight Whitney (1827-1894). common interests which brought them together first in person and then through correspondence, were Orientalism and Comparative Philology. Modern comparativism, having its roots in the eighteenth century and its full flowering in the nineteenth, has been instrumental in the spread of Hindu thought both in France and in America. One should note, however, that long before Whitney and Renan, the figures particularly treated in this essay, American interest in Oriental thought was stimulated by French Orientalists. This fact has been documented in a work by my late friend, Arthur Christy, namely, Orient in American Transcendentalism. A Study of Emerson, Thoreau, and Alcott.1 Here we come across the names of Jean Pierre Abel Remusat (1788-1832), Anquetil Duperron (1731-1805), and Eugene Burnouf (1801-1852), pioneers in Oriental research who were near contemporaries of the transcendentalists mentioned above. Thoreau edited and probably translated portions of Burnouf's Introduction a l'histoire du Buddhisme indien (1844) for the Dial (Jan., 1844, IV, 391401), under the title of The Preaching of Buddha. Thoreau bequeathed to Emerson a translation of Burnouf's Le Bhagavata Purana, ou Histoire Poetique de Krichna (1849), from which Emerson transcribed some quotations in his Journal.2 French literary concern with the materials laboriously brought into view by English, American, German and French Orientalists can be seen prominently coming to the fore in the writings of the physician-poet, Henri Cazalis, who wrote under the pseudonym Jean Lahor (1840-1909). That interest is manifest in his Histoire de la litterature Hindoue (1888), in La Gloire du Neant (1896), and, in fact, throughout all his works. Our American philosopher and poet George Santayana (1863-1952) observed that one of the three influences to which Lahor yielded was the pantheism of the Hindoos. He was aware, Santayana notes, that while natural science and pantheism differed in tone, they both revealed a universal flux, and that in this we find ourselves confronted with the same Glorie du Neant, a nothing that is beautiful in its nothingness. Santayana adds the reflection that these two elements in Lahor's philosophy-the Oriental and the scientific-tend alike to represent man with his intelligence as the product and the captive of an irrational engine called the universe.3 While an American thinker was interested to take a look at a Frenchman's use of Orientalism, a Frenchman, Romain Rolland, was concerned with American interest in that field. complexity of the cultural amalgam presented by American life impelled the French novelist and thinker to remark, It would be a matter of deep interest to know exactly how far the American spirit had been impregnated, directly or indirectly, by the infiltration of Hindu thought during the nineteenth century. extent of that penetration has been seriously studied by Frederic Ives Carpenter as well as Christy. Rolland considers this as a psychological problem of the first order, intimately connected with the history of our civilization.4