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 Vedas. 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