The German Genius

appeared in 1849–50 and an English version in 1873. Military colleges on both sides of the Atlantic began to adopt On War as a major text. After its failure to contain the irregular forces in the Boer War in South Africa (1899–1902), the British army began to take an interest in Clausewitz. The main message the British found was the need for popular militarism. And this view spread. At the beginning of the twentieth century, all the nations of continental Europe began building powerful armies and fleets, and Clausewitz was regarded as one of those responsible for these developments. Writing the introduction to an English edition of On War in 1908, Colonel F. N. Maude said: “It is to the spread of Clausewitz’s ideas that the present state of more or less readiness for war of all European armies is due.” 63

The Mother Tongue, the Inner Voice, and the Romantic Song
     
    I n France in the late 1680s King Louis XIV added six young Jesuits—all scientists as well as prelates—to a mission he was sending to Siam. The men were put ashore in the south of India, the first of the French (as opposed to Portuguese) “Indian Missions” that were to gain fame for their Lettres édifiantes et curieuses , which gave detailed accounts of their experiences. Abbé Jean-Paul Bignon, the French king’s librarian, requested that the missionaries be alert for “Indic” manuscripts, which he was keen to obtain to form the backbone of an Oriental library. In 1733, in the Lettres édifiantes , the Jesuits announced their response: the discovery of the first “big game” of the hunt, a complete Veda, long thought to have been lost. (It was in fact a complete Rig-Veda in Sanskrit.) Subsequently, a whole raft of Hindu manuscripts was brought to Europe in the eighteenth century, and that movement, together with the deciphering, at much the same time, of the Egyptian hieroglyphics and cuneiform, prompted Edgar Quinet, the French anticlerical historian, to describe it in 1841 as an event “more or less comparable” with the arrival of the ancient Greek and Latin manuscripts, many in Arabic translation, that had transformed European life in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Raymond Schwab, in The Oriental Renaissance , argued that the discovery of the Sanskrit language and its literature was “one of the great events of the mind.”
    T HE O RIENTAL R ENAISSANCE
     
    The so-called Oriental renaissance properly began with the arrival in Calcutta of William Jones, a British poet, linguist (he spoke thirteen languages), and judge, and with the establishment of the Asiatic Society of Bengal in January 1784. This was established by a group of talented English civil servants who were employed by the East India Company and who, besides their official duties helping to administer the subcontinent, also pursued broader interests, which included language studies, the recovery and translation of the Indian classics, astronomy, and the natural sciences.
    Jones was president of the Asiatic Society of Bengal and it was in his Third Anniversary Discourse that he announced his great discovery which was to transform scholarship, namely the relationship of Sanskrit to Greek and Latin. In “On the Hindus,” his address delivered on February 2, 1786, he said: “The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of the verbs and in the forms of the grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong, indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists.”
    In linking Sanskrit to Greek and Latin, and in arguing that the Eastern tongue was, if anything, older than and superior to the Western languages, Jones was striking a blow against the very foundations of Western culture and the assumption that it was more advanced than cultures elsewhere. The history of the East was at last on a par with that of the West, no longer subordinate to it, no longer necessarily a part of that history.
    Although it was an Englishman who had discovered the all-important link between Sanskrit and Greek and Latin, and although the French carried out some of the earliest translations of the Hindu scriptures and classics, the Oriental renaissance found its